How I Was Manipulated for Three Years

I am not a mental health professional, and I'm not aware of any official diagnosis for my abuser at this time. When I refer to them as a narcissist, it's because they appear to fit my understanding of the term, and it's a term many people can recognize and extract helpful context from. It's very rare for people to receive a diagnosis for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Largely because the people who suffer from it are unable or unwilling to seek help due to the unfortunate nature of their condition.

It's very difficult to describe the behavior of my abuser to both outsiders, and people who know her. The one trait I can factually discern about her, that everyone who has lived or worked with her for a reasonable time can attest to, is that she is a pathological liar. She cannot stop lying about herself and the people in her life. Her entire life is a mystery no one will ever be able to decipher. Her story will be very different depending on who you ask. She's told some people she's half Mexican, others were told she's half Syrian on her dad's side, and I was told her grandmother is Palestinian. I have met her family on both sides, and none of the above appear to be the least bit true.

Those were lies told so she could pretend to be a white-passing person of color. But why? Was it an impulsive reflex, with no forethought or control? Perhaps she wanted to appear special to others in a climate where the rights of people of color are in jeopardy. That seems a reasonable guess, but only she knows the real answer and she cannot be trusted. I cannot tell you why she would spread those lies, and if I tried to extrapolate upon her actions I’d only encounter a new web of lies.

I hope you can understand now just how futile it is to try and decipher her motives. Only she knows her true identity, if she has one, and It is something she has never shared with any of her closest friends or lovers. If she woke up one morning and started speaking the truth we would never know it. As I tell this story, I am going to try and stick only to what I observed for myself, and exclude any guess work.

A Fun, Exciting, and Strange Start

They were a newer employee at my office and I didn't know anything about them until the day they asked to sit in my cubicle during lunch. We didn't talk much, she said she was just looking for a quiet place to take a break and I didn't mind. She'd pet my dog as she browsed through her phone. We might briefly chat about unimportant things while I practiced drawing sketches during lunch. After a few days of this she had me add her to Google Hangouts instead of the workplace messenger. Before I knew it she was messaging me all day at during and after work. She immediately created nicknames for us; I was Butter, and she was Bread. Within a week she had convinced me to let her hang out at my house after work so she could wait out traffic there.

She asked if I'd like to start 'platonic friend dating'. She explained it as just a platonic thing, nothing serious, just hanging out doing normal things but maybe a bit closer than usual. So things like snuggling and watching a movie, but never anything sexual. She had just broken up with her girlfriend and didn't want to make any bad choices. She was gay, so I didn't need to worry about anything romantic. I went ahead and accepted, it seemed reasonable even if it was super odd but I tend to be open to new things. It wasn’t long after that before she was occupying every aspect of my life. The only time I had to myself was sleep and my commute to work. She would stay at my house until dark and message me constantly whenever she wasn't actually with me.

Very quickly there seemed to be no difference between what she called 'platonic friend dating' and most people call romantic dating. Starting when she wanted to spend the night because she was too tired to drive home one night. Once I accepted that, she was physically at my side 24/7. Next thing I know she decides we're soulmates. She was gay, but she decided that she's homoflexible with me. I don’t really understand why I wasn’t more resistant to what was happening and the speed at which it was happening. My guess is that I was in an emotional place in my life where I really wanted someone who could make me feel special and who I could be intimate with. She was giving me near unlimited amounts of attention and it doesn’t hurt that I was way too trusting at that time of my life too. I'd never even heard of a 'red flag' before.

Everything was a dream for a couple months. She was telling everyone, including her whole family, about how amazing I am. She’d never met anyone as nice and wonderful as me, she'd say. I'd changed her mind about men, and she no longer thought all men were misogynist assholes. On and on like that; non stop. But the dream started to feel a little less dreamy when I first experienced her road rage. She could have really scary road rage after work. I had never had a strong anxiety being a passenger in a car before, but quickly developed one so strong it was hard to keep my eyes open sometimes. But, I loved her and she seemed to be a very nice person in any other setting, so I shrugged it off.

Within the first few months of us being together she moved in with me. She was getting kicked out of her place. She had a big falling out with the person that rented a room to her and she needed a place to live or she'd be homeless. I went into rescue mode and offered her a place to stay. She told me, and my roommates at the time, that she’d only stay for three months. She did not honor that. When tensions arose between her and my roommates about her overstaying, she turned on my roommates and demanded that I advocate for her. She started lying about things they would say or do, making them appear bad and untrustworthy. She created a toxic situation that made my roommates feel forced to move out just to get away from her. I was blind to it too, because I didn’t yet know she was lying to me about everything. I loved her and wanted to trust her, so I was in denial of my own intuitions telling me something was very wrong.

Her father passed away. Something to know about her dad was she didn’t have a relationship with him at that time. He had cut her out of his life. He went no contact with her years before because she was manipulating him and ruining his life. She shared this fact with me openly, but also said that was the old her and she had changed. She needed to go to his funeral but had no money to do so and her family couldn't help. So I offered to fund everything and joined her on the trip. Right when we were leaving, she surprises me by saying that I have to tell her family we’re married. She’d told them all we were married and I had to keep that lie for her. I didn’t want to cover for her lies, but I was not in a position to refuse. She was very devastated about her dad’s death and I didn't want to make the situation more difficult than necessary. There was a lot of tension in the family with her, probably because of the falling out she had with her dad. I noticed that she didn’t exactly talk much with most of them, and she didn’t speak with her grandmother at all. The only one who seemed to be willing to interact with her a lot was her uncle, who is a psychologist. After the funeral she started using the death of her dad as an excuse for literally all of her bad behavior. If she did something unacceptable, she'd say it was because her dad’s death had changed her. This was how she would combat any and all criticism of her actions.

It's Just Us Now

We had the house to ourselves now and I had hoped things might improve. That's when she had one of her first tantrums. She liked to claim she had OCD, among many other things, and one day she was in a very foul mood and was complaining that the silverware was arranged wrong in the drawer. She blew up about it. Yelling, stomping her feet, and slamming doors. I was very scared, it felt possible that she might start hitting me, but she didn't. She claimed it was always like this and I'd done it a million times and couldn't get it right, but this was the first time she'd ever mentioned it. As she stomped out of the room, I looked in the drawer and didn’t see anything out of place. It was exactly how she liked it and I was very confused as to how she could be so angry. It went on for twenty minutes or more before she demanded I fold the laundry. I was so emotionally overwhelmed and confused by the whole thing I actually broke down in tears while folding. Things like that started happening once or twice a month. She pretended to have various invisible illnesses as a way to keep me on my toes. For example, Misophonia which is an extreme sensitivity to some sounds. Like a fork scraping a plate, fingers on a chalkboard, ect. So I had to be very careful and hyper aware of my actions around her at all times. In order to adhere to her demands both macro and micro took a great deal of mental energy, and it was always stressful wondering if she was going to have another outburst if I made any mistakes. I was beginning to develop chronic anxiety. The gaslighting had begun and it was changing me.

Before we lived alone together she had always been very supportive of me, but things started to change with how she would respond to me and my life challenges. For example, if I was explaining a difficult encounter with a person at work I might get a response like: “Maybe it was you though`” or “You could be imagining things” or "Well, you're basically on the [autism] spectrum." She had stopped offering any advice or support and would be dismissive. She also started to tell me that I had a personality people just didn’t like. Unbeknownst to me, she was telling people behind my back that I either didn’t like them or that I appeared to hate them. I quickly found myself with no local friends to talk to. Everyone I hung out with didn’t talk to me anymore, or had moved away. I was limited to just my friends from my time serving in the Navy who I spoke with online. She tried to get to them too. I had a chatroom setup where I’d talk to one of them, and he once tried to make a funny joke about how I didn’t have as much time for him anymore because of my new relationship. She attacked him in private chats, shutting him down. She told me about it and was trying to make me feel that he was a bad friend. The only other people I talked to outside of my relationship were the people at my workplace, but they were co-worker acquaintances not a support group. She had looked up my co-workers and befriended some of them on Facebook, keeping an eye on me even at work. I had no one left who I could speak openly with about my concerns. I had become completely isolated.

Things Began to Escalate

Despite all of my efforts to help her with every crisis she had, both real and fictional, she started to declare that our relationship was not balanced. It was her favorite thing to say frequently. “This relationship just isn't balanced.” We had a really bad fight around this time. Her car window was broken overnight, and when we were looking for a glass repair shop she started yelling at me because I couldn’t find a place quickly enough. It was Sunday, and there were no car window repair shops open. She had difficulty accepting it even when looking for herself. Later that evening I tried to confront her about her habit of yelling, as it was far from the first incident, and all I said was, “This morning in the car. I just wanted to express that it’s not acceptable for you to yell at me like that.” She completely blew up. Yelled at me for hours. The centerpiece of this was that I had “never done anything for her.” I had no right to tell her not to yell at me. She was trying to make me feel as worthless as humanly possible at the loudest volume she could muster. After she had exhausted herself and finally quit, all I could do was break down into tears. It's important to note that whenever she would leave me in distress she would always follow it up, usually the next day, with apologies, flirtatious behavior, and act unusually nice. Her normal attitude was typically one of indifference and so the sudden attention would be notably different. This would last until I settled down, and then she'd return to indifference.

Around this time was also when she had invited someone to live with us. They were probably just as or more manipulative than she was. It was an online friend of hers from a hidden Facebook group, who she was secretly trying to manipulate into starting a polyamorus relationship with us. Without any discussion with anyone on the matter, she had suddenly started acting as though we were an established polyamory group. She'd tell people all about it, even complete strangers. Our new roommate seemed to have no interest in the idea and started dating a new romantic within their first week of moving in. For many months there was a passive aggressive war going on between the two. The new roommate would regularly text bomb us with aggressive bullying, and would regularly manipulate my partner for financial help and favors. It was so bad I had to block their phone number. Eventually they decided to move out, which was a great relief to me.

The True Nightmare Begins

Sadly, things only got a lot worse for me after the bad roommate moved out. I was alone with my partner again and the gaslighting got turned all the way up to the max. At this point I was really feeling the effects. I was mentally and physically exhausted at all times. I was barely able to hold a conversation with my friends online due to a crippling and persistent anxiety. I always felt confused and frozen with indecision. I'd struggle to work out what I could do to avoid trouble and maintain some semblance of harmony with my partner. It was also during this stage that I’m fairly certain she was trying to convince me to commit suicide. She started regularly saying things like, “I’m going to come home and find you dead in the bathtub” and “You better fix your depression.” I’d always respond saying that I wasn’t suicidal, but would work on my depression. She’d say, “Well I have experience with this because I’ve almost committed suicide countless times, and you look like you're going do it.” Despite her insistence that I was on the verge of suicide, she didn’t offer any kind of help or assistance at all. Instead, she seemed to be greatly offended by it. Without her saying it, I got the distinct impression that she wanted me to do it because, if I did, it would make her life a lot easier. However, I had no intention of killing myself, and instead focused heavily on trying to repair my mental health on my own.

Something else to begin happening at this point in time was that she claimed she needed to work 60-100 hours a week just to make ends meet. For four or five months straight she only came home on weekdays long enough to change clothes and sleep for about six hours. On weekends she would claim to be working even more overtime of 8-10 hours a day. So I hardly ever saw her even though she lived with me. I was basically living alone at that point. One to three nights a week she would make an excuse to not come home at all. She'd get too drunk at an office party, or have to work overnight at the data center. I would rarely have any advance warning, and no word of her safety until the following day. Despite all the overtime she was claiming to work, her bank account would always be overdrawn. And not by small amounts, it could be overdrawn by a thousand dollars or more. She started bouncing checks. As a result I was constantly having to work extra hard to pay all the bills she couldn’t; her portion of the rent, her gas, and pretty much every other living expenses we had. Despite her claiming to work ridiculous hours, and not paying any of our shared expenses, she’d still manage to always go negative. Not coincidentally, the start of this behavior corresponds with when she made a new friend. A friend she would describe as her new 'platonic only friend.'.

I caught her cheating when she accidentally left herself logged into YouTube TV on my computer. I have my browser setup to launch gmail and hangouts automatically, and the first thing I see coming home from work is a hangouts discussion she was having with an online friend. It detailed in her own words the night she told me she was camping alone to mourn the anniversary of her dad’s death. She wasn’t camping alone. She didn’t go camping at all. She was at her secret boyfriend’s apartment doing drugs likely including heroine. She cheated on me both emotionally and sexually, and here she was bragging about it to someone I’d never heard of or met. She told this person how in love she was with him. It also detailed how she had a plan to leave me in a few months time. She had already made the arrangements to move in with her secret boyfriend. She was going to string me along, continuing to have me pay her bills, continuing to tell me our relationship was loving and strong, and then just disappear one day while I was at work.

The same night I tried to ask her what the status of our relationship was. I asked it plainly. “Are you in a relationship with anyone else?” and “Are you thinking of leaving me and starting a new relationship with someone else?" Her response to both questions was a flat no and, she added, “I do not relationship hop.” Then she took control of the conversation and turned it into an hours long blame-shifting marathon directed at me. Ending with me crying. I wanted to confront her about the cheating, but instead got met with hours of gaslighting.

I can honestly say that by this point my mental health was not good. I was rock bottom. With additional revelations of her engaging in rampant cheating with multiple other partners, and more hidden drug abuse was too much for me to process. I was thankfully able to muster the strength to break up with her. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, by far. An old friend I had dared to confide in told me to stay strong, and that was the mantra I used to find the courage needed to tell her I was ending the relationship. It took an entire week for my mind to quiet down enough to sleep. It raced with questions day and night about her betrayal. Questions about how deep the lies went. I didn't have anyone I could talk to. She had made me believe that everyone I knew was closer friends with her than me, or not a friend of mine at all. It was the most traumatic and terrifying experience of my entire life.

A few weeks after I broke up with her, someone arrived with a car to rescue me. I packed up my most important things and left. The direct abuse had finally ended. Now all that was left was to recover from the damage my mind had suffered from more than three years of constant manipulation and gaslighting.

I’m confident that nothing she did to me was an accident. Based on conversations she’s had with various people, there are instances of her bragging about manipulating me and cheating on me. She was self aware and intentional in her choice to use psychological manipulation and abuse on me. I've come to a personal conclusion that manipulation, gaslighting, and cheating is likely a fun game for her. She enjoys the thrill of it.

There is much more to this story, but I just don’t know how to fit it all in without writing an entire book about it. I plan to write much more on my experiences and the subjects related to it. I'd like there to be far more social awareness of the extreme dangers represented by psychological abuse. Some people never recover from their experiences with gaslighting and I would like to see it someday treated with the same level of severity reserved for crimes like rape and murder.

I'm lucky to be alive. Thank you for letting me share my story with you.