Shame is a powerful emotion
I dare say it’s as powerful an emotion as love
Shame is a powerful emotion
I dare say it’s as powerful an emotion as love
I’ve been seeing a shrink
It started after I told Thing #1 I wanted to kill myself and asked if she wanted to come with
That was when I finally realized I was out of control
It’s been since high school, some 30 years ago that I’ve felt so self-destructive
Suicide has always been something my brain tosses about when I get frustrated, but I never really talked to anyone about it because:
Why should they even care?
Everyone has their own shit to deal with.
What can they do to help?
I’ve been remiss with my “therapy” and it’s been showing in my everyday life.
As my writing has dropped off, so have my spirits.
To be honest, I stopped writing because I was feeling stupid for the choices I was making and I no longer wanted to share them here for fear of being judged.
Because I am judging myself.
It’s already been 5 months and I am still trying *not* to hate myself for the choices I made with Jim/Mick.
…still trying to convince myself that the terrible things he wrote about me are not true.
whatever the fuck that means… It seemed fitting.
I haven’t been talking about Mick much on here because a ton of things have been happening in a very short time. I don’t know what I want to share and what I don’t.
We’ve spent one night a week together every single week since things got started with us at the end of February, nearly every single Sunday afternoon, a couple of Friday evenings, and we also meet most Tuesdays for ‘lunch’. Sex is only involved on the night we spend together. Tuesdays there is a lot of kissing and touching, sometimes he puts his hands around my neck… Fridays we just hang out somewhere cool, and Sundays seem to be our “talking day” with some kissing and touching and, once, sex.
We made our 6-month agreement on a Sunday and have been discussing our “relationship” pretty much every Sunday since then. Every conversation is a productive one, whether good or bad. He thinks all of them have been good; I think most of them have been productive but they have left me feeling like shit more often than not.
Saturday grocery shopping is getting harder and harder to do. Every weekend (because the husband allegedly refuses to get a driver’s license) I get to drive Mr. Doom-n-Gloom and Thing #2 around to do the weekly shopping.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. When it comes to Mr. Doom-n-Gloom I can never pin down what I mean… With him it’s a deep emotional manipulation that he’s been playing for years. I get lost in it because he completely uses my emotions. He plays off of pity (he acts truly pathetic and, at this point, I think he only does it so I will let him stay here with me out of pity).
When I try to actually bring up some kind of problem that I have with him he turns it back onto me; if that doesn’t work, he starts to play the martyr (pathetic) card, and when that doesn’t work he gets petulant. He acts like a dog who I have beaten too much and he just gets so pathetic that I have given up trying with him because I know, at this point, no problem/s can truly be dealt with (and, because of his lovely behavior, NEVER will!).
He’s so foul and moody all the time. All his conversations are negative. I can’t remember if it was always this way, or if I just started realizing it now that I am trying to practice more gratitude (I wish he would try a little bit of that!!!). His complaining is starting to rub off on Thing #2 and I would like to “nip this thing in the bud”. My conversations with her about gratitude fall on completely deaf ears as she watches her father reflect on the Pitiful Heaviness of Being.
Here is an example:
Every single morning he complains about the guy that drives him to/from work. Every single morning I ask him why he keeps riding with this guy if he hates him so much. Mr. Doom-n-Gloom’s response, every single morning is, “He’s a reliable ride.” But every single morning we have that same, exact conversation… What I think is: after all this time, this dude is the only one at his job that can actually tolerate being alone with Mr. Doom-n-Gloom for longer than 5 minutes. Meanwhile, this ENTIRE getting-driven-to-work situation could be prevented if the muther-f##ker would just get his muther-f##king driver’s license!!!!
Thing #1 doesn’t even like to be around him any more. She avoids interacting with him when at all possible — it’s sad that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with her father. She is frequently hurt by Mr. Doom-n-Gloom’s behavior towards her and the things he says. At one point he told her that he probably wasn’t going to live to see her graduate high school — that devastated her. (I told him one day that I felt that was a COMPLETELY inappropriate thing to say to his underage child!!! He simply said, “It’s probably the truth. She needed to know” and that was the end of it.) She pulled back from their relationship and, ever since then, has been very distant toward him — in turn, he treats her even more negatively. Making no attempts at repairing the damaged relationship with his oldest daughter — knowing full-well that she turns 18 in 2 months and will probably be moving out of his life soon. She feels the favoritism that he has towards Thing #2, it’s obvious, he doesn’t try to hide it in any way (at times I think he does it intentionally — emotional manipulation…) but he says that it’s Thing #1’s fault. I say, who gives a flying fuck whose fault it is?! You are the adult and the father. BE THOSE THINGS!!
It is pointless for anyone to talk to him about it. He just acts butt-hurt and slams doors for an indeterminate amount of days. In the end it boils down to what appears to be a lack of respect and consideration for any other physical beings outside of himself. All he can think of is himself and how miserable everything is for him all the time. I have tried to tell him that feeling a little gratitude for the little things might help his foul outlook on everything else.
The man obviously needs therapy, if just to learn how to act towards other people… Because I am not going to tolerate his childish behavior forever — I have told him as much. It doesn’t seem to matter to him (probably because I have never left him and I am still here). Even therapy seems pointless because we would have to go together in order to get him to go and that would be under the false pretense that I want to make our marriage work again (our marriage never worked. I didn’t know what a functional relationship was supposed to be like. It was always broken like this, I just didn’t see it until 5 years ago) — it would just be he two of us “fighting with supervision”. Mr. Doom-n-Gloom thinks he’s a totally wonderful person and that everyone else has the problem.
Here are a few examples of how he acts; in private, in public, on the phone, with strangers, etc… I am guessing that this could be why people aren’t his “friend” for more than a few months before they stop talking to him (or stop giving him rides to work).
I don’t know, it seems like it could be, but I need someone on the outside to tell me:
Do you think Mr. Doom-n-Gloom truly is a Narcissistic Sociopath? Am I in denial that his emotional condition is that degraded? Or am I completely exaggerating the situation because I am too melodramatic and intolerant? Do you think that *I* am a narcissistic sociopath?