Do they enjoy hurting you?
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Do they enjoy hurting you?
I had posted just yesterday about the cruel things my XA said via text.... and well, coming down off of the hurt from that now and just finding my zen again.
But, I do have a question.... my XA was pretty much under the radar until the mean exchanges we had yesterday, and though I finally stood up for myself, he obviously attacked me back, and now seems to be coming out from his shell into the public, posting things where he is laughing...yada yada.
He hasn't "acted" this happy on a public forum in a while.
Is this common behavior too? I mean that they are actually happy when they feel they have said enough that they feel they hurt you enough? Do your AH, BF's, X's enjoy it when you are hurt to some extent...does it really make them happy?
I am REALLY trying not to read into it, that he actually enjoys thinking that he may have hurt me. So hence my questioning to see what you have seen on your end...
But, I do have a question.... my XA was pretty much under the radar until the mean exchanges we had yesterday, and though I finally stood up for myself, he obviously attacked me back, and now seems to be coming out from his shell into the public, posting things where he is laughing...yada yada.
He hasn't "acted" this happy on a public forum in a while.
Is this common behavior too? I mean that they are actually happy when they feel they have said enough that they feel they hurt you enough? Do your AH, BF's, X's enjoy it when you are hurt to some extent...does it really make them happy?
I am REALLY trying not to read into it, that he actually enjoys thinking that he may have hurt me. So hence my questioning to see what you have seen on your end...
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Hey, no need to apologize for feeling negative. I feel ya!! 
Trust me, I thought I had come to terms with my feelings, but I have allowed myself to be sucked right back in, and still have slight anxiety over the exchanges I have had.
I feel hurt. I want him to feel hurt, but the impression is that he is happy. And that hurts. It's a vicious self inflicted psychological cycle.
One minute- really i'm ok. I'm SOOOOOO grateful that he did not want me. The next minute I feel so hurt and betrayed.
Their lack of conscience or caring is just, well, hurtful. Atleast to me.
Trust me, I thought I had come to terms with my feelings, but I have allowed myself to be sucked right back in, and still have slight anxiety over the exchanges I have had.
I feel hurt. I want him to feel hurt, but the impression is that he is happy. And that hurts. It's a vicious self inflicted psychological cycle.
One minute- really i'm ok. I'm SOOOOOO grateful that he did not want me. The next minute I feel so hurt and betrayed.
Their lack of conscience or caring is just, well, hurtful. Atleast to me.
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It's so up and down..very frustating. Its hard to care so much when they just don't. I am trying so hard to detach and as soon as I get there, he sucks me right back in. I am embarressed for myself sometimes for what I put up with when all his actions clearly YELL at me that he doesnt give a rats ass if I am around or not.
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I understand for sure. I get so upset with myself for even have cared one iota for someone who used me until he was done, lied to me, tried to suck me back in, then hurt me all over again, then call me psychotic for creating the relationship with him in my head, that I ruined our friendship and I am clearly insane....
Ummmm yeah, and I feel a loss of WHAT exactly??
I ask myself that a lot. It's difficult for me to look at how he treats his current gf compared to how he treated me....I mean he chooses to keep her in his life, live with him.... I am someone he can just say "I never cared about you!" and dispose of so easily.
It's very very difficult to not feel hurt over that. I do try very hard to remember that much of his decisions are based around the fact that he can continue a life of drinking with others, and not with me.
He just really had me fooled. Sometimes I still want to believe he is the man I thought he was. And that is magical thinking. Dangerous hurtful magical thinking.
If that makes sense. I feel I am just rambling. I need to vent tonight. I feel alone, and hurt, and like he won. I know I know, not the case. Just how I feel tonight.
Ummmm yeah, and I feel a loss of WHAT exactly??
I ask myself that a lot. It's difficult for me to look at how he treats his current gf compared to how he treated me....I mean he chooses to keep her in his life, live with him.... I am someone he can just say "I never cared about you!" and dispose of so easily.
It's very very difficult to not feel hurt over that. I do try very hard to remember that much of his decisions are based around the fact that he can continue a life of drinking with others, and not with me.
He just really had me fooled. Sometimes I still want to believe he is the man I thought he was. And that is magical thinking. Dangerous hurtful magical thinking.
If that makes sense. I feel I am just rambling. I need to vent tonight. I feel alone, and hurt, and like he won. I know I know, not the case. Just how I feel tonight.
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It takes time, Kitty. I know how cliche that sounds, but it's the truth. The longer you are away from him and the more you begin to discover things that you love doing, the easier it will be for you to push all those thoughts of him out of your mind. Then, one day, you'll realize that you honestly just don't care anymore.
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I think I'd look at how he's acting as more of a, "See, you can't hurt me!" than a, "Yay, I hurt you!" You probably said stuff that hurt him too, and he's probably putting on an act to show how much he doesn't care or hurt. He probably doesn't even have the capacity to see that he's hurt you.
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Oh goodness NO!!
There is absolutely no connection that I have to him any longer, aside from a couple of mutual friends....which really aren't a part of his life.
It's just the grief process for me right now.
There is absolutely no connection that I have to him any longer, aside from a couple of mutual friends....which really aren't a part of his life.
It's just the grief process for me right now.
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Yes she does. She is actually his former gf too. They had broken up before he and I started talking.
She is 24, he and I are both 34, but they met when she was 20. She and her family are all big drinkers.
They have a history no doubt, and he is comfortable with her.
But right when things started to really go down hill between us he had finally come out and told me he was an alcoholic after a car accident one night (last july)...he wanted to stop drinking, and yada yada.
The next day he was saying he could control his drinking.
2 weeks after that he had flown his ex down here to be with him (all the while lying to me about that which i found out later). And then decided he couldn't live without her. After they got back together a while later I had seen tons of pictures of them out drinking together, beer always in hand.
Kinda made sense to me why he went back to her.
She is 24, he and I are both 34, but they met when she was 20. She and her family are all big drinkers.
They have a history no doubt, and he is comfortable with her.
But right when things started to really go down hill between us he had finally come out and told me he was an alcoholic after a car accident one night (last july)...he wanted to stop drinking, and yada yada.
The next day he was saying he could control his drinking.
2 weeks after that he had flown his ex down here to be with him (all the while lying to me about that which i found out later). And then decided he couldn't live without her. After they got back together a while later I had seen tons of pictures of them out drinking together, beer always in hand.
Kinda made sense to me why he went back to her.
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Kittyboo, if it's any help, it may not be the case of the alcoholic enjoying hurting others. It's very possible your X has the perception that he is not hurting you at all.
I just completed step 4 of the 12 steps of AA (the personal moral inventory) and learned a lot about myself. It wasn't pretty.
I learned that I was always surprised that I hurt people because I assumed they didn't care for me anyway. (Yeah, crazy). I often didn't realize I was hurting people because in some situations I perceived them as wronging me. Delusional? Absolutely!
I repeatedly ran away from relationships and people when the slightest conflict arose. I deserted them. But, I didn't see it that way: my perception was that "I was saving myself from a bad situation". When in many cases I was the cause of the bad situation.
I think as long as your ex continues to be an active alcoholic who is not in a recovery program, (that includes a rigourous personal inventory like AA), then he will go blithely through life hurting people often without the slightest clue that he is doing so.
From your perspective, maybe you can minimize the hurt if you understand that an active alcoholic is almost always very blind to their own actions....and continue to keep your boundaries up for your own emotional protection!
And perhaps keep very low expectations of him ever acting normally, until he stops drinking and starts working a recovery program.
I just completed step 4 of the 12 steps of AA (the personal moral inventory) and learned a lot about myself. It wasn't pretty.
I learned that I was always surprised that I hurt people because I assumed they didn't care for me anyway. (Yeah, crazy). I often didn't realize I was hurting people because in some situations I perceived them as wronging me. Delusional? Absolutely!
I repeatedly ran away from relationships and people when the slightest conflict arose. I deserted them. But, I didn't see it that way: my perception was that "I was saving myself from a bad situation". When in many cases I was the cause of the bad situation.
I think as long as your ex continues to be an active alcoholic who is not in a recovery program, (that includes a rigourous personal inventory like AA), then he will go blithely through life hurting people often without the slightest clue that he is doing so.
From your perspective, maybe you can minimize the hurt if you understand that an active alcoholic is almost always very blind to their own actions....and continue to keep your boundaries up for your own emotional protection!
And perhaps keep very low expectations of him ever acting normally, until he stops drinking and starts working a recovery program.
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I don't know what the reason for A's hurting other people is: Whether it is accidental, planned, deliberately vicious, whatever.
All I do know is that being in a relationship with an alcoholic is hard at times, can be hell if they are active, and if someone rocks their boat by leaving them.....wheeeee, batten down the hatches and wait for the storm of anger to break over all within the radius of their venom.
I have wondered if it is mainly used as a distraction, something to move the attention off their drinking and on to the @*&#%$ who dared to walk away.
According to my ex I left him, being mad from going thru menapause, and I had these mad affairs with both respectable men and down and out homeless drunks. I almost thought I was ga ga for a short while, as he played some weird mind games with me.
Had a Dr check me over and she was most upset with me, as she was having a rotten time with the dreaded "Change", and according to my tests I had been there and gone thru it all about 5 years before....and didn't feel a thing.
As for those men, Lord help us, the respectable one's were well married and not the most oomphy males on earth, and the others, well NOT on your Nellie, thanks but no thanks.
I had 1 smelly old drunk, and wasn't replacing him with any that were jobless, homeless and some ill nigh unto death.
I replaced him with a peaceful, empty space.......Oh how wonderful that space was.
Kitty...don't bother what he says or thinks ( if he can), be thankful this gutless little loser is back with old gf, and out of your space for good.....your good.
God bless
All I do know is that being in a relationship with an alcoholic is hard at times, can be hell if they are active, and if someone rocks their boat by leaving them.....wheeeee, batten down the hatches and wait for the storm of anger to break over all within the radius of their venom.
I have wondered if it is mainly used as a distraction, something to move the attention off their drinking and on to the @*&#%$ who dared to walk away.
According to my ex I left him, being mad from going thru menapause, and I had these mad affairs with both respectable men and down and out homeless drunks. I almost thought I was ga ga for a short while, as he played some weird mind games with me.
Had a Dr check me over and she was most upset with me, as she was having a rotten time with the dreaded "Change", and according to my tests I had been there and gone thru it all about 5 years before....and didn't feel a thing.
As for those men, Lord help us, the respectable one's were well married and not the most oomphy males on earth, and the others, well NOT on your Nellie, thanks but no thanks.
I had 1 smelly old drunk, and wasn't replacing him with any that were jobless, homeless and some ill nigh unto death.
I replaced him with a peaceful, empty space.......Oh how wonderful that space was.
Kitty...don't bother what he says or thinks ( if he can), be thankful this gutless little loser is back with old gf, and out of your space for good.....your good.
God bless
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sorry this happened, kitty. i understand that tremendous need to have your say but it never goes the way we had planned, does it?
i think littlefish raises a valid point, but also think it's not the same for everyone. he may be so out of touch, or narcissistic, that he does not see how his actions negatively affect others.
but
in the case of my addict, he was out of touch this way while using. once he told me that when he yelled at me, he was really angry with himself. recently when he was talking to a friend who kept falling off the wagon, he said that he had some clarity about how he affected his loved ones - he related by being on the other side.
bottom line: you need to stay away from hurtful people in order to not get hurt. not talking legitimate hurt, misunderstandings, little behaviors which are later apologized for; they happen even in healthy relationships.
about his being "happy". . . . not a chance. it's an illusion.
i think littlefish raises a valid point, but also think it's not the same for everyone. he may be so out of touch, or narcissistic, that he does not see how his actions negatively affect others.
but
in the case of my addict, he was out of touch this way while using. once he told me that when he yelled at me, he was really angry with himself. recently when he was talking to a friend who kept falling off the wagon, he said that he had some clarity about how he affected his loved ones - he related by being on the other side.
bottom line: you need to stay away from hurtful people in order to not get hurt. not talking legitimate hurt, misunderstandings, little behaviors which are later apologized for; they happen even in healthy relationships.
about his being "happy". . . . not a chance. it's an illusion.
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I sometimes do things that other people experience as hurtful, when I don't return a call right away for example, without any intention or knowledge that I've hurt them.
There are times when I do something that I know someone else will be hurt by: divorcing my husband, stopping my son stay overnight with his actively drinking alcoholic father. But I've weighed them up and it is the lesser evil, or something I had to do for my own sanity.
There are times when I figure it might hurt someone to do something but think that I want to live my life the way I want to live it and F*!" everyone else.
There are times when I say or do hurtful things as a defence mechanism, to turn away an attack in the heat of an argument.
If I am honest there are times when I have intentionally caused hurt to someone, perhaps in an argument, and I briefly get a sick pleasure from inflicting that hurt, I have enjoyed that feeling of them hurting, being less than me, and am not at all proud of that.
I'm human, I try to do less of the 4th and particularly the 5th.
Your ex may be doing all of these things. Does it matter what his motives are? it hurts you to be in contact with him, those feelings are valid, and you have no reason to have to stick your hands back on the fire. Processing the relationship is necessary to your emotional well-being and happiness, and your perception of reality is as true as any other, but you'll never know his motives, ever, we CAN'T know what goes on in the mind of another.
It's hard enough working out our own thoughts and motives, but at least that IS possible, and brings huge benefit.
There are times when I do something that I know someone else will be hurt by: divorcing my husband, stopping my son stay overnight with his actively drinking alcoholic father. But I've weighed them up and it is the lesser evil, or something I had to do for my own sanity.
There are times when I figure it might hurt someone to do something but think that I want to live my life the way I want to live it and F*!" everyone else.
There are times when I say or do hurtful things as a defence mechanism, to turn away an attack in the heat of an argument.
If I am honest there are times when I have intentionally caused hurt to someone, perhaps in an argument, and I briefly get a sick pleasure from inflicting that hurt, I have enjoyed that feeling of them hurting, being less than me, and am not at all proud of that.
I'm human, I try to do less of the 4th and particularly the 5th.
Your ex may be doing all of these things. Does it matter what his motives are? it hurts you to be in contact with him, those feelings are valid, and you have no reason to have to stick your hands back on the fire. Processing the relationship is necessary to your emotional well-being and happiness, and your perception of reality is as true as any other, but you'll never know his motives, ever, we CAN'T know what goes on in the mind of another.
It's hard enough working out our own thoughts and motives, but at least that IS possible, and brings huge benefit.
Last edited by JenT1968; 04-10-2010 at 03:08 AM. Reason: short circuit between brain and typing fingers
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It has everything to do with him, and nothing to do with you.
I know it's hard not to take it personally.
Just as the alcoholic thinks the world revolves around him/her, we codependents have a tendency to think their behaviors/attitudes are about us.
That just simply isn't so.
I know it's hard not to take it personally.
Just as the alcoholic thinks the world revolves around him/her, we codependents have a tendency to think their behaviors/attitudes are about us.
That just simply isn't so.
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