Letter to the New Girlfriend: A Survival Guide

It's not you.

Writer’s note: This letter was originally intended for my eyes and my healing alone, but it evolved into a creative project that draws on my accumulated experiences with these personalities throughout my life. It is my opinion formed from my observations as both a journalist covering the issue, a woman who has worked for these personalities, and a victim of nonphysical violence in partnerships. Names and specifics have been omitted to protect the privacy of all.

This began as an exercise from my beloved therapist, with whom I’ve worked for nearly six years, and who knows that I process the world through writing. What it became was my form of activism —a campaign to raise awareness for the more subtle forms of abuse that often don’t receive attention, that confound the victim in a trap that can last for years or a lifetime. It’s hard to put words to what is happening at first. It is like a slow slaughter of the soul. My hope is that this helps the survivors put words to the quiet violence that ensues as a survival guide for all men and women enduring the psychological labyrinth of the emotional abuser. Neglect, the absence of loving acts, is a form of emotional abuse, too.

My brother-in-law’s brother took his own life the same week I finished this because of a personality like this. It’s dedicated to him.

This exercise was meant to process and validate my experience, and it did in the most beautiful ways. It ended up being a letter to the younger version of me, the one who fell for it, who blamed herself so she could fix it, and who let her abuser deny her reality. This project opened a door that allowed me to give her, and all women like her, unconditional love and compassion.

It occurred to me that I could make use of this exercise and share it. Writing and sharing are how I serve the world as a professional. I hope this letter helps walk us through all relationships that subjugate our personal freedom, whether that be a dysfunctional workplace, partner, system of government, cult, fear-based religion, family, social club or friend group.

May it also help us see the ways we become complicit in our own abuse through their reflective deception, that of the power-over personality or structure, which moves about the world with fear-based motives, wearing a friendly and familiar mask that mirrors our own authenticity. The key to our freedom lies not only in awareness but also in self-awareness. Self-love and trusting your intuition are the antivenom as you navigate the jungle of their dishonesty.

May we all one day detangle ourselves from the seductive dance with the wolf dressed as a sheep and call all of our power back. If you listen with the ears of your heart, these personalities will tell you exactly who they are. One day you will look back and realize something has always felt off. This will teach you to trust your precious heart. They hide in plain sight, but something in us doesn’t want this deception to be true, especially if we have invested in it. The power of wanting something to be true... it is potent.

Much like the Wizard of Oz, these people and systems are nothing but a false façade, a shell, a fleshy casing to a hoovering void.

When you are finished reading this, I recommend writing your letter to the new employee, partner, best friend or cult member of said personality. Let these tender souls know what is coming and how to survive this. Like my assignment, it is for you. I do not suggest giving these letters to the people they are addressed to, but if you do see a friend getting lost in the fog of these patterns, speak up. Tell her what you know about covert abuse. Give her this letter.

If you were a victim or are still navigating this, I hope this letter keeps your head and heart from imploding from the pain, confusion and loss you will experience once entangled in their web of deception. I hope this letter serves as a lifeline.

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Dear new girlfriend,

I am here to warn you, even though I know you will not listen. I am ashamed to say that I wouldn’t during that first intoxicating year (or two). But I never want you or anyone else to ever have to walk through what I have with them. I fear you will need to experience it for yourself because you will never believe what I am about to tell you based on your first and foundational moments, your honeymoon years.

After all, he has the best manners. He is gentle. He is a thoughtful, good and performative lover. He has the sweetest disposition and will hold your hand while driving, in the movies and even when you’re sleeping. He makes you laugh. He’s ambitious and successful.

Quite the catch.

Then why would I or anyone else ever leave him? Have you ever asked yourself that when he told you early on that he was still recovering from our breakup? Have you ever wondered why he moves on so quickly from woman to woman? I asked myself that during a conversation about our exes, when he told me a woman he was madly in love with before went silent. He said he had no clue what happened. I felt bad for him when I heard this years ago, but then again, this story didn’t make sense. Why did she ghost him after such a passionate, intense and requited love? Why did she file a restraining order? Why would anyone leave this wonderful man? He must be misunderstood.

I wondered but shoved it away, not wanting to know where that truth could lead.

Survivor amnesia. The first of many terms I would recommend becoming familiar with. It’s what we do to work through the overwhelming betrayal and deception we experience. We look the other way, we forget, we blink. It is like a warm blanket of denial that we wrap tightly around us when the weather turns cold so we can stay.

Now I know, and now I know why it had to be a no-contact situation with the previous girlfriend. Because if a woman leaves the door cracked open even a little, he will send a deluge of murky water to drown her in her house. But first, he drowns her with love to get her back. He says wild things like: "I want to get married and move in together.” When weeks before, he was ice cold on the subject.

If only he had never tried to come back, whether through fake love or hate, we could have stayed strong in our decisions. Because he will break every promise, along with every part of your heart. But these men don’t let you go that easily, and they play on the strings of your kindness and empathy.

I did finally leave him, and the courage it took for me to walk out into the world alone again after I thought I had met my person, to say goodbye to what I thought was real love, the love of my life, or so I thought, after I had already endured a divorce just a few years before, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I couldn’t believe I had fallen into yet another cycle, another trap.

But I am now free. Free from the black hole that he is, swallowing me whole. Free from the games, the dishonesty, the confusion, the push-pull-slot-machine love.

I say what I thought was real love because it just occurred to me that nobody who truly loves another would ever treat them the way he does. Love does not do that. I am learning that love is patient and kind. Love isn’t confusing or crazy-making. Love doesn’t wield power or control over another through manipulation and games. Love lifts and holds. Love's words match its actions. Love is consistent and steady. Love follows through.

My hope is that you break free too, and much sooner than I did.

I kept going back, and even after I finally walked away, I stayed in touch. Maybe it was to soften the blow of the loss. New girlfriend, it is never a good idea to stay in touch with people who deceive, hurt and confuse you. That, too, you will have to learn on your own. I was warned. I did not listen.

The deception he is capable of will cause gut-wrenching nausea. I am still uncovering all the ways he lied to me … about everything.

After he sent me a series of absolutely bizarre emails late on Christmas night, following a few quiet weeks, I got a new perspective of the mental cavern his soul dwells in. I still haven’t seen him since the day I left him in May nearly a year ago, although he has tried. For me to illustrate all the ways those emails were chaotic, hurtful and cruel would be another letter. But they revealed a lot.

His first email asked why I had gone silent on social media among a concatenation of other weird things. I told him because I learned from a mutual friend that he is with you now, but he had been dishonest about that when he said he couldn’t imagine even looking at anyone else, just weeks before, when he called and sent me flowers on my birthday. Since I declined to see him, instead, we spent hours on the phone that night, and after learning about you a few weeks later, I realized he was lying about everything on that call, and not only to me, but to you.

I heard a whisper from my inner knowing once: Hey, if he’s gaslighting the ex-wife and manipulating her, or treating that waitress like shit, or picking fights with random cab drivers, but he’s nice to me, then this means he is two-faced, he is inconsistent, a pattern that reveals he can turn that behavior on and off, which is conscious manipulation. He will probably do that to you one day, if he isn’t already.

But I hushed the voice and moved on. To listen would mean to lose him. What I didn’t know yet was that to stay would mean to lose me.

After I left that lunch with our mutual friend, I realized I was still being played, or rather, I was positioning myself to allow it. I cried the whole way home that day. But it was a gift. It helped me see the amount of deception he was capable of, which was more than I had previously been able to admit or see, and that some part of me was still hoping we could stay friends. These were a few of the countless illusions I had to work through.

I also had to learn the hard way that I was not safe in any space with him, not in the social media space and definitely not the friend space.

When I told him I knew about you in a return email on Christmas, his return email illustrated rage, the kind that needs a victim, someone to hurt. He said that you were never his girlfriend, and plus, “it’s over now.” Now his reaching out to me “with a bleeding heart” made sense — he was looking for another source of supply. Holidays can be hard for them, especially if their new energy source for their parasitic soul isn’t working out.

He proceeded to send me even more sick, drunken, disconnected, contradictory, dishonest, and so, discombobulating emails. Something about never giving up hope on us, but sandwiched between wishing he had never wasted three years on me, yet sad he couldn't spend Christmas with me. It was confusing, but everything with him is.

Cognitive dissonance – another term to become familiar with. Cognitive dissonance is the mental and emotional tension that arises when conflicting experiences — his fake narrative and your reality — try to coexist in your mind and heart. It creates a brutal splintering, where what you know deep down clashes with what you're being told, shown, or expected to believe.

You will begin to experience a fog, often used (consciously or unconsciously) by those who manipulate or distort, through charm and confusion, through cycles of love and withdrawal, through false promises and twisted mirrors. He told me I was loved while his actions betrayed that love. Not at first … I didn’t know it was happening at first.

Just before I realized it was time to go “no contact” and “grey rock” this man (more tools for your future sanity), and stopped responding to his emails, something I didn’t have the heart to do before, he told me you were asking for a second chance and that you had unhealed parts you are working through, and said he may try to work it out with you. He said, “I hope you learning this doesn’t hurt you,” which is exactly what he intended to do. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have prefaced the sentence in such a way, and as I had told him, I preferred not to hear about the new women in his life.

But by the grace of my dogged and determined healing, I no longer cared. I was finally rising above his game, which is the most powerful place you will get to one day too, new girlfriend, if you ever get out of this.

My heart did break in that moment, but not for me. For you. In a matter of a few short months, you were already being deceived, discarded and entering the cycle of abuse. He took you back on one condition: that you deny your truth. You may not see it when you’re in the middle of the cloud of chaos and confusion he creates, but you will one day when you look back.

He now controls you, convinced you that you are causing the problems, and you have learned not to express anything that might taint his perfect and fragile image.

When you have the courage to leave one day, block him from all remaining and leaking outlets. I learned blocking on your phone doesn’t automatically block email, so do that too. Even then, you may receive prank texts from burner phones pretending to be men asking you out. I assume he’s checking to see if you’re dating again. The area code will reveal a pattern. I learned one is from the city you live in, the city he travels to for work often. If it hadn’t been for all the survival guides written by other women who have been through this, I wouldn’t have known to expect such odd behavior and would have texted back: “You have the wrong number” or “Who is this?” Then he would have gotten a pulse on me, the supply he needed. Be aware that this is something you may also experience. I will never know if it was him or not, but my gut says it was.

The crazy thing is, I still doubt myself. That is the lasting impact these types will have on you after they have put the egg-beater of psychological manipulation to your brain. A trending term is “word salad.” I would add, “with a side of scrambled eggs.” But even that doubt is now dissolving with each passing month that I am away from him.

They need you to believe in the lie, in their image, because it is all his empty promises have going for it. The energy you feed the lie sustains it like blood to a vampire. So they will put on the costume and the act, and you will fall in love with someone who never existed, and like a numbing yet venomous bite of kissing bug or a black widow, you won’t even know it is happening, you won’t even know you’re dying inside.

But my hope is that this letter validates the crazy you will feel when you truly start to see beyond the long black veil, and that it lets you know — it’s not you.

It could take some time — it took me nearly two years.

My hope is that you know that you didn’t do anything to deserve this. But first, you will stay because you didn’t know what you were drinking was poison because it tasted like sweet milk, the kind that comes from a mother’s breast and promises nourishment and connection. You won’t know it is poison until after he seals the trauma bond water-tight with intermittent breadcrumbs of love baths and promises, long hand-holding walks through city parks and cafes.

One day, you will start to stand up for yourself and possibly detach from the illusion, but you may find it's as sticky as a bug breaking free from a spider's web. You peel one arm and leg off, but in an attempt to get your remaining limbs free, the other side gets stuck again.

There will be some things that make you uncomfortable at first. Perhaps it's the occasional periods of silence. Later, it may be when you find out he is still talking to his exes, or liking their bikini photos and butt shots on Instagram. Yes, he slept with them too. Maybe he’s consistently and painfully romantic for weeks, but you will feel like he starts to distance himself after a few perfect dates, or even a few perfect trips. It might feel like he changed his mind. You will doubt yourself because when you ask if everything is OK, he will tell you he is busy, but first get really pissed at you for bringing the inconsistencies up in the first place. All you wanted to know was whether he felt the same way you do about him and whether he was interested in moving forward in the relationship. After all, you just bought the flight for the upcoming trip but hadn’t heard anything in days.

Months later you will get the courage to ask him again about these stretches of silence and distance, hoping for honest and kind communication, seeking understanding in the inconsistencies, the hot/cold, and to see if he feels the same romantic feelings you do — he will shut you out for asking. Not before he says it is “pressuring” and gets angry. He might even say, “This is a red flag. Are you insecure? I was just telling my friends about how awesome you are, now this?”

You may feel ashamed when he calls you insecure. What if I am (you ask yourself)? Later, you will realize that if you were not insecure before the relationship, this experience created insecurity from the chaos of mismatched behaviors and walls he hides behind. And what if you were bringing the ache of past traumas into the relationship, not with harm, but with a need for clarity? Doesn’t love meet you with compassion and curiosity where you are? You learn that love doesn’t point and shame, and you will release that shame in moments of self-love and compassion for those parts of you that doubted your worth. Then you will take responsibility for what is yours and what is his … property lines. What is left after this lesson is the unkind way he meets you, the way he invalidates your experience, every single time you disagree with him.

At first, you will feel shame and take back what you said. After all, it sounds like this is a deal-breaker following that red-flag comment. You apologize and silently vow to change your neediness. You might even start studying love attachment styles and diagnose yourself as an anxious attachment. After all, you are committed to seeking solutions. A prayer may sound like, “God, change me so that I am not so ‘pressuring’ to this amazing man.” After a few more weeks, he might compare you to his ex-wife, which scares you because he says he hates her. Or worse, compare you to me, the ever-inquiring witch who wrote this letter. This hurts you deeply. What if you are a knot in his rope of bad patterns? What if YOU are the toxic one with insecure attachment issues? So you take accountability and apologize.

These thoughts begin to swirl in your monkey mind and will stay for years. Self-doubt will settle into the marrow of your bones. What bubbles up to the surface of your awareness is a pattern of defensiveness, denial, and deflection, which means everything you’re feeling will be turned back onto you as he invalidates your entire dizzying reality.

Patterns. Notice those. Within them lies the truth when you can’t see up from down, when you’re wrapped in that warm blanket of denial with an IV of his fake-heroin-like love pumping in your veins. These patterns will help you spot the cycles, but denial and survival amnesia will drop the long black veil back over your eyes again and again. You will go back to sleep every time he hits you with the poison, sleeping beauty. It is the mother’s milk that makes the baby latch and puts it back to sleep.

You’re falling in love. You’re getting closer. To keep you around, he’s starting to plan your future together. From time to time, you try to reach him in the most loving way when you want to address a confusing inconsistencies. You seek connection and solutions. You are not shaming him. But his immediate humiliation creates a devastating wall. Remember, he needs you to see him a certain way. The armor goes on and the fortress of walls goes up. The pain from the resolution you sought is far worse than the issue you were addressing in the first place. Way worse. You feel bad for asking, so you remember next time something feels “off” not to bother him with such trivialities, no matter how much you hurt from the mixed messages and inconsistent behaviors.

What you don’t know yet is that this begins a possible years-long campaign to silence you so that you will behave exactly as he needs you to. This will feel wrong in your body. You begin to realize you are denying your own reality by not speaking up. After all, you have a voice, and your gut instinct tells you to use it when something hurts. At times, it will seem like he is listening and open to change because he does something different the next time conflict arises. But one day you will realize that even that is a form of dishonest manipulation with no real empathy behind the mask. Everything is a game for him. As a result, he will think everything you do is a game, even leaving. In those Christmas emails, he said that he had waited for me to come around for seven months. Why did he wait? For what? I was not playing a game. I was not making a point. I was rescuing myself. I was gone. He was with you that whole time … waiting for another woman?

One day, you will see that even cordial behavior is a form of manipulation. Think of it this way: if empathy is inconsistent, if it is something he can turn on and off, then it is not real empathy; it is manipulation. When you are in it, you’ll want to believe the good times are the real him. Later, you will realize that the good times were just a facade, a mask.

Once you’re in the game deep, things start to get worse. Maybe he skips a phone date without texting about the delay or cancellation. Those are important for long-distance relationships, and any relationship with him will be long-distance. You miss him. You love him. You don’t get to see him all the time. But he will not be accountable. He will pretend there was never a phone date scheduled. Or he will say he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t even text to say he couldn’t make it. Again, he will grow angry and say you are critical and controlling. The silent treatment ensues. He will say he needs more space. More space? You only see each other six to eight days out of the month. Then he will say he needs to create boundaries with you. What? He ghosted you. And if he knew anything about boundaries, they are for the person implementing them, not a tool you use on another.

When he returns, he may say, “This isn’t working.” He may tell you that this is all too much for him. You are wearing him down. Your heart will shreak in pain, your head will pound, and you will not know what is happening. It echoes the very thing your mother used to say to you as a little girl in tears. Patterns. Remember patterns.

Moments of clarity will interrupt the shame: How was it that you were the one in trouble in this situation? He ghosted you; he said that nasty thing to you. But that is how it works with him. Every. Single. Time. Someone once told me: Be wary of the person who punishes you for the consequences of their actions.

When hoovering you back into the chaos of his life, he will tell you he is slowing down with all the travel and work so you all can spend more time together. But when convenient, and he wants space, he will use work as an excuse. Plus, he needs the work as much as he needs you to fill his internal void. He craves the accolades, adoration and awards. He is a “big deal.” His words.

After he gets fired from a job for what, in my opinion, was because of this very behavior, to protect this precious image, he will tell his massive international network that he left the job or was laid off due to company financial cuts. Then he will start a smear campaign against the company. It spreads like wildfire through the new company he’s love bombing. But you know the story because he told you through tears. Then one day, he tells you he was laid off with his head cocked back as if he didn’t remember telling you the truth the week before. You will start to wonder if you’re dating two different people. You’re not crazy, you are — in fact—dating two people, and neither of them is authentic.

He goes quiet for a few days again. You are not sure what is going on. A text here and there, but so vastly different from the week before when he was calling twice a day and texting every hour. You brace yourself. He says it is because he is with his kids. But you spend so much time with him and his kids, and he’s on his phone a lot wih them. This feels dishonest, because last time he was with his kids he was sending you lots of messages and selfies. And he had just told you for the first time three months before, “I love you.” You thought this was going somewhere. Your mind begins to twist like a pretzel again.

You are so confused you might even become furious. You can’t help but speak your feelings, but the punishment you will get in return will match your boldness. He will accuse you of not respecting his time with his kids and being jealous of them. Whew. It knocked the wind out of me to write that one — I am a mother who spends all my free time mothering my boy, who lives with me all of the time.

Or maybe this time you keep quiet. Pick your battles, they say. Why do you always want to talk about our relationship and focus on the problems? He will ask. Why do you live in the past? I got that one again on the Christmas Day emails. What he fails to see is that the injuries are current, including those emails.

The punishment for not moving on from the pain fast enough could be threats to leave you because your feelings and needs are too much. Or he may threaten to leave you because he is “such a bad boyfriend.” And he will leave you, again and again, and this is soul-crushing, even if leaving is in the form of the silent treatment in which you start the grieving process because you feel you have lost him…again, only for him to return days later and act like nothing happened.

You apologize for expressing your needs, which sounds like: “I must be too needy. My expectations are out of control. I am so sorry. I will work on my part.” This really means: I will stop voicing my pain at the push-pull, hot-cold, inconsistencies, and confusion in this relationship.

Dear woman, you may say this to yourself, and when you do, you will notice you are becoming a woman you never thought you would. It was a slow insidious boil, it is violence to the soul. Have you learned how to kill a frog? You put it in a pot of room-temperature water without a lid. Slowly turn the heat up over time, and they won’t even notice they are being boiled alive. So they don’t even think to use their strong hind legs to jump out.

And you will comply and lose yourself because when you are with him, it feels like heaven. To have him happy, to have him close, is euphoric because just the day before, you thought you had lost him, and you don’t know when you may lose him again. So you comply and you move on through the day, the weeks and the months.

Bouts of really good times become the super glue to your toxic bond. You hold hands as you walk through some cool city, laugh and eat ice cream. It is as if your relationship is right out of a Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks rom-com. He’s “loving” and sweet. You feel you are finally past the uncertainties.

At times, he is actually good to you, but one day, when you’re free of this and have time to drop the veil of denial, you won’t really know if he actually was, because you start to see just how dishonest he was. About everything. I compare it to a rose garden. There are three: one is all roses, one is all thorns, and the third one is half roses, half thorns. With emotional abusers, you exist in the third garden. This is why it is so hard to leave. Aren’t some thorns OK? The roses are so beautiful and smell so good. But what you begin to realize one day is that it may as well be all thorns because you never know when you will get ripped up when you lean in to enjoy the roses. You are never safe, because he loses your trust. What is wild is that he will blame you for the problems in the relationship, saying it is because you don’t trust him. He says you have trust issues stemming from your “unhealed” past wounds.

The next thing he does seems to come out of nowhere. It really is intolerable. It cuts deep. So you say something. It doesn’t matter that you say it with love and kindness, he will punish you. Not with punches or name-calling. No, he’s too smart for that. You would have something tangible to point to as evidence of abuse if he did that. Although more often than not, these situations lead to that. Instead, he will kill your spirit and abuse you in a series of micro-abandonments. These wounds he inflicts, nobody can see, and it's hard to describe, even to yourself. What is most heartbreaking, is how could someone who loves you, see you in pain, and still inflict more pain? A very sick man, that’s who. And you may say that this is not your experience, yet, but you have to ask yourself, if he has done this to several other women, what makes you different? And yes, you are different. But he is not.

You try to find words through tears to your friends. Their facial expressions and reactions to your experience will reveal the injustice this man inflicts on your soul. They start to validate your experience until you can validate your own. Stay close to the women in your life, for they will be your life vest when you’re drowning in his deception.

Denying your own needs and silencing your voice to make this work will feel like dying over and over again.

But to lose him would also feel like dying.

At some point, your soul starts to leave your body. He will ask why you’re not fun anymore. He will tell you that he wants someone who is fun, who he can travel with and laugh with, which implies that it is not you. He knows what he is doing. It’s weird because you just spent two weeks in an exotic country together and had the time of your life. Your joy carried the weight of his moods. If you throw up when he says you’re not enough, it's OK. One day you will feel normal again, I promise.

You are so happy when he finally shares a photo of the two of you on his Instagram page (not his stories, which he keeps private to only a select group at first). It only took a year. Now I know it is so the other women he’s stringing along don’t know about you. It would mess up his game, his endless supply of women. He takes it down days later. Your heart sinks again. Don’t bring that up, though. He will destroy you for asking. But I did bring it up.

“Why are you even looking at my Instagram page, anyway?

“Because you’re my boyfriend.”

“It doesn’t mean anything! I was rebranding the look of my IG grid.”

“Well, it meant something to me.”

“Why are you always complicating things? You create problems.”

(We didn’t speak for three days after that. He said it was because he was with his kids. When we finally got back on the phone, he threatened to leave me and said I wasn’t supportive enough of him. I was a bad girlfriend, and he said he felt alone in the world.) He can’t see that you aren’t approaching him with accusations but rather sharing your heart about what hurts in hopes he will care enough to stop. It is like he sees the world through really ugly glasses, and you are on the landscape of that world.

He tried to convince me once that I was seeing him through the lens of my childhood trauma. It was a smart manipulation. A good one. Because those of us who are unaware can act out of our wounds. And maybe that could be true if I hadn’t done the countless years of work around my trauma and worked a recovery program of accountability, which he made fun of at one point. But it was yet another projection of his, because that is what he does. It was another attempt to gaslight.

After a while, the patterns will become clearer, like connecting the dots, and every difficult conversation you have, my dear, will feel like walking into a fun house at the state fair. The floors move, the bent mirrors distort, the smoke machines confuse, and the strobe lights nearly knock you off your balance. You stop walking and brace yourself so you don’t collapse. He will say you feel confused because you are confusing him and yourself. It’s you, not him. He considers himself a good boyfriend, he says. After all, he has good manners, he’s hot and fun, I say to myself. In one of his Christmas night emails to me, he wrote a whole paragraph about why he’s such a great catch, the balm he needed for my mistreatment of leaving him, he says. He then wrote about this major transformation he had experienced — he was a new man! But his actions that night and the following days told me a different story, and I now knew the difference.

Maybe it is just you, he will say, and he will remind you that you are the only person in his life causing these problems. He will let you know that none of his ex-girlfriends ever accused him of such things. I often wondered if some of them didn’t have the words for what was happening to them. I know his wife found the words, because about six months into dating, he said his ex-wife thought he was an abusive narcissist. “No way,” I said. “You’re so thoughtful and considerate.” And I meant it. Looking back, he was grooming me. Another word to become familiar with.

That will happen a lot. He will say two things in the same sentence that don’t go together. He may attend another award party in New York City and go AWOL, never calling when he returns to the hotel to say goodnight. Nor did he return your concerned texts, telling him you love him, to say goodnight, even though he was posting lots of cool party pics on his Instagram, some in drunken adoration for others in his industry. He calls the next morning early from the airport: “My love, I miss you so much. The party was great and I kept thinking about you nonstop and how much you would have loved being there.”

“Huh? Then why didn’t you ever text me back or call me after you got home from the party to say goodnight?”

“Because I just didn’t think about it. I forgot. I am so so sorry. I know how that must have felt,” he says in a high-pitched lie of feigned accountability.

He never told me what happened. He insisted it was nothing.

“My love, those two statements don’t even go together — you couldn’t stop thinking about me, but you forgot about me?” (This was the end for me, by the way. That was the last day we were together. My heart had already begun to close a few months before, as any flower would after being exposed to acid for years. I knew that I would never be emotionally safe with this man, because I could never trust him. The dishonesty and deception are on a whole other level. The words and actions never match and never will. Once I started to peel the denial off my shoulders, that was one of many hard pills I had to swallow, and you will too.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

At some point, when he says YOU ruin everything by always wanting to TALK about everything so that you can understand where he is coming from, he will give you the speech about how people from his country are just happy, jovial people who love to laugh, hug, have fun and keep life simple. He says this to shame me for my desire to understand and seek solutions with all of my talk about feelings. The irony is that he is none of those things. His people may be happy, and I did fall in love with his country and its beautiful people, but he is not like them.

He has the anxiety of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Now I know it is because of the countless lies he harbors and the impostor syndrome. I finally got it, men like this have impostor syndrome of epic proportions because they are, in fact, imposters. The anxiety is so bad that he will never, let me repeat that, NEVER be present with you. At first, you chalk it up to a bad day at work, then a busy month at work. Okay, maybe a busy mind? He may play on his phone while you are on a date. He’s constantly on his phone. But then, you remembered all the times he didn’t have time to text you and say hi because he was so busy. How does he have the time to play on LinkedIn, checking the status of his impressive like count at dinner with you, but he can’t text you to say he loves you during a busy work day?

His mind is always spinning, and it is always somewhere else, even at events that are important to you, like, say, your father’s funeral, which he almost didn’t attend because he said that after several years together, we haven’t been together long enough to justify him sacrificing an award show for my loss. Disgusting. He will say something like: You didn’t plan the funeral quickly enough to accommodate his big week in New York, where he was supposed to accept an award that he never actually won. But the press. What about the press? By the way, it was hours after my father had passed when this happened. I hope it never happens to you. I had to grieve the loss of my father and the loss of my partner in the same few weeks.

You will think it is you, and he will tell you it is you, but sweet girl, it is not you. So I ask you to run away from him. Not walk, run, like all the women told me to do the first two times he discarded me. But you must stay like I did because your soul came here with lessons to learn. The pain you will feel with him will make you stronger. The times you resist will repattern you in ways that are like a complete system upgrade to a computer. Damage will be done, and you won’t even notice the evil corroding thread of his silent violence traumatizing you to the point of shaking with what you think are chills and a fever, to sleep.

What is also so painful about this is that your partner, your love, will tell you in so many words that your needs and your feelings don’t matter. His actions will repeatedly demonstrate that he would rather defend himself and protect his fragile image than acknowledge and respond to your aching heart. Even many months after I left him, when I told him his Christmas emails were insulting and hurtful, and to stop. “No, they aren’t,” he replied. “OK, maybe the third one, but not the first two.” They were all hurtful.

The more confused you become, the thinner you will become. You lose your appetite because of all the adrenaline, the hurt, the excitement of love returning, and the cycle of abuse keeps you on your toes. You will also start to age more rapidly. At some point, you will begin to feel like a shell of your former self and your beauty will start to fade.

I have never figured out if he realizes that he is punishing you. I think he sometimes does, and that he is more conniving and manipulative than my heart will allow me to admit. (I wrote those previous two sentences before the holiday-hoover email incident. The gift from that Christmas Hoover experience is that it confirms he knows what he’s doing. I couldn’t admit that before I was ready because I would have to admit that I chose to stand in a relationship with this man who never loved me and deceived me for years.

In the first few months or even years, you will see someone who is cool, calm and collected. It is yet another lie. There is nothing you can do to make that anger subside no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you comfort, offer solutions and support him. This anger, this rage, will be directed at you for getting curious about some of his behaviors that don’t make sense. Maybe you became curious about his interactions with me before they stopped when I learned about you. Oh wait, he lied about that too.

I know, I should have stopped long before. I should have never replied to his Christmas emails. It’s tricky. See, your heart is in a knot, and your mind lies to you when it says that if you stay in touch, that knot will loosen and begin to untangle. It’s another lie you tell yourself.

You will say you are confused. And he will say, “I am just a confusing person.”

He will steal your own words often. Or he will accuse you of what you are accusing him of. He is not confused. He does that to mess with you. Later, when he’s hoovering you back in after some horrible bout of navigating his emotional labrynth and you’ve vowed to leave him for good, he will use your words then too. And to get you back, he will admit to all the abuse he dished out and vow to get help, to change. It is all another lie, because he never thinks he’s done anything. Remember, nothing about him is authentic.

He will use words that you use to describe your needs and your healing journey, but this time to describe his needs and his healing. Yet he’s just parroting you, not genuinely expressing a need. It becomes another mind fuck. Toward the end of your time together, you will see, if you ever wake up to this nightmare, that everything is a mask, a performance, a trick. Everything is supply, even the likes on his LinkedIn account. Especially the likes on his LinkedIn account.

You will begin to doubt your reality. Not because you’re crazy, but because he has broken it over and over. Soon, he won’t have to do much at all because you will begin to break your own reality. They make you complicit in your own abuse, a second-degree murder of your own soul. First, he silences you, and then you silence yourself. You have no choice but to be complicit if you don’t want to lose this beautiful love. It could quite literally take your breath away.

I hope that you see the red flags and wait for real love. The younger version of me would walk into a field of red flags and think they were roses, all for me. I have been working on that. Alone. Because I don’t want to bring into my next relationship the blindness and toxic ways I had to show up in this relationship for it to work.

The woman I am today is very different from the woman who started dating this man. In this way, he was a gift, a teacher, the harbinger of an ego death. His psychological chains became my wings. Every scar will become a source of wisdom. Your pain will become your purpose. I have never loved my precious and courageous heart more than I do now.

I fear you will stay though. Because there will be times when you are floating off the ground it feels so good to be with him. Then there will be times you are face down on the same ground, wondering how you will ever peel yourself off the floor. From that place on the floor, you will do anything to be floating again, with him. Heroin feels similar, I hear.

Speaking of, look up the rat studies in the 1950s that received intermittent rewards of cocaine-laced water. That is what his bread crumbs of love does to your brain. It’s not your fault, it’s neuroscience. The withdrawal feels like dying. And the hit is euphoria. This is why you may stay and return and stay and return. Your brain convinces your subconscious that death is imminent if you don’t. For this reason, you become addicted to his druggy love. But sweet girl, please know that this drug will not sustain you for very long.

Know that he does not get to validate (or invalidate) your worth. You get to do that all on your own. Once you do find self-love and self-worth apart from him, maybe during one of his bouts of silence or when you find out just how much he is lying to you, or when he leaves you in a fit of quiet rage, self-love becomes the antidote. It’s weird, but he will not respect you for staying through his mistreatment. You only earn his respect when you finally stop tolerating his abuse. But then that lures him into an obsession with getting you back, that is, if he hasn’t moved on to another woman as quickly as these types need to, like he did with you. He needs a warm body.

He will do and say anything to get you back because he is now deeply “in love” with this new woman who stands up for herself. Once he has you back, convincing you he’s a different man, that he will go to couples therapy.

Once you’ve settled into euphoria thinking, “we have arrived as a couple,” after several months of true deep love, the games return. You. Cannot. Believe. It. Is. Happening. Again.

No matter what happens, you will be OK. Whatever he does or doesn’t do to you, if you are sober and awake, it will push you deeper into the beautiful truth of who you are. Because you are perfect, beautiful and worthy of the kind of love that gives and gives and gives, the kind of love that feels safe, consistent, is honest, kind, understanding and unconditional. Whatever happens, you will grow toward this truth and learn this through the pain. He will make you so uncomfortable that you will have no choice but to dive into the depths of your soul, your truth, and seek the wisdom that resides there deep in your heart.

I do hope this letter validates you when you feel confused or hurt. I want you to know that it is not in your head. It is in your heart, your center of truth. I want you to look in the mirror and say over and over, “I did not cause this.” Know that this letter will be waiting for you with the infinite patience of the Great Mother to read again when you are ready to leave. Every time he breaks your heart or something awful happens in the relationship, write about it in your journal. They help you identify patterns. These saved me later on when I thought about returning one last time. They were warnings to the future me that conveniently forgot the pain he caused, so I could stay. The blanket of denial I wrapped around me was so warm. How dare anyone try to rip it from me?

Lose him or lose yourself? In these unhealthy relationships, the choices are mutually exclusive.

One day farther down the road of recovery from this horror, you will need to allow yourself to grieve and grieve and grieve. You will have compassion for the woman who fell for him and stayed, just like I have compassion for both you and my former self. You will hold her close and see that she was trying to survive in a love story she thought was real. For her, to stay alive meant to stay, no matter how much it was killing her. She had to choose between a quick death and a slow death.

Later, when you begin to heal, you might see he was a mirror offering a glimpse into the relationship you have with yourself. This is a hard reality to face, so I say this with gentleness. You will begin to see the ways you participated by contorting your precious heart to meet him where he was, to submit to his lies and control of your shared narrative. This awareness hurts, but it will be the ticket to freedom from repeating the cycle with another.

And when you have compassion for her survival methods, you will innately develop compassion for him and the ways he used you to survive his darkness, because for him to lose your precious light, your warm body, would also mean a death for him. These men cannot be alone for this reason. They are not self-aware, so they unknowingly relive their childhood horrors every time they argue with you. You will realize that every time you come to him with a need or get curious about his behavior, to him it is a criticism or an attack. His overreaction to you is from something he endured long ago. It’s not you, my dear. This is not your problem, and it does not mean you deserve it.

Always honor your voice, your truth. He can’t hear your needs because he is consumed by shame and isn’t willing to delve deeper into his problems. He is incapable of being honest with himself and thus incapable of being honest with you. You will never be able to trust him, and never feel safe for this reason. He can’t show up for you because he can’t show up for himself. I say this with compassion, after all, I was incapable of being honest with myself about him.

I don’t mean to rush you to forgiveness. Take your time feeling all the rage he never let you feel. Some experts of emotional abuse argue that forgiveness is not necessary for survivors of these types of men (or women). Whatever you need to do to move forward, most importantly, you must first feel the rage and the anger. Those are ways you are validating yourself through this. Read all the books and watch all the YouTube videos about emotional and psychological abuse. They will help keep you stay in reality when you begin to slip back into denial of the subtleties of your broken reality.

Create something from your pain. It's another way to start showing up for yourself. When these words spilled onto the page before me, it all got even more real for me. As a journalist, I am in the habit of reporting facts to investigate something, then I weave them into a nonfiction story. I did that for myself here, and my heart cracked open as the word that played over and over in my head as I reread this: monster.

Break the habit of denying your feelings because he denied you for so long. Spend every morning asking yourself how you are doing. Write it down, and affirm it. You will become for yourself the human he could never be for you. You will become the love you have always deserved. From this place, you will not be so prone to giving your power away or giving them power over you.

It’s a dance, and it takes two to tango. He may use this line to tell you that you are also abusive. Don’t fall for it.

This compassion you have for yourself will only come from allowing yourself to feel the sadness, the rage and the anger that comes from his silencing mistreatment. This compassion will feel like a release that will ultimately be the key to letting him and all men like him go, once and for all.

I imagined putting him into a raft and letting him float away into the ocean. Then imagined putting my former self, the one who kept going back and doubted her worth, into another raft and watching her drift away. You are no longer that woman. I am no longer that woman. Let her go. You may sob as you watch Gaia swallow them into her womb, which becomes the tomb for what no longer serves the woman you are becoming. Then you can start to reclaim all your power and walk away, untethered and with a new potent gift of discernment. This newfound wisdom will become your superpower.

With the energy of the dark goddess Kali, may you no longer dance with the devil, but rather dance on the bodies of those who no longer serve your highest good and most beautiful path forward, figuratively speaking, of course.

May we all love ourselves into the loving relationships, the loving world we deserve, and into the powerful men and women we are becoming, and may we lead the way for others toward their freedom.

I may not know you, but I love you. Because you are another woman, and when women connect over shared pain, something powerful happens. For this reason, there are some countries where women are not allowed to speak to each other.

I hope this letter finds all the men and women who need to hear this.

Your sister,

-Me

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For help recovering from dysfunctional relationships, contact Natalie, a licensed therapist and relationship coach. She also offers free relationship coaching via a live Zoom webinar on Thursday mornings. It is a beautiful community of support. Click the button below to learn more.

*This story is inspired by a combination of lived experiences throughout my life.