Moomin Mama
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

Hi Ewa,

thank you for all your amazing free content. I was involved with a narcissist for four and a half years, the latter two and a half were the most excrutiatingly emotionally and mentally painful of my life, and I’ve had 12 relationships with men over the course of my life (I’m no spring chicken!). I’ve never experienced anything like it and never want to again. I’m now ten months no contact after I ended the relationship.

About a year before the break up after an awful lot of trying to work out what the hell was going on, I finally stumbled across the answer on various websites and channels such as yours and I am very very grateful. I had no idea people like this existed!

However, as armed as I am with knowledge I feel no further on in my recovery, I am a broken, almost non-functioning shadow of myself. I feel as though I have a huge black hole in my soul, devoid of anything but pain. The obsessive thinking, round and round and round is driving me nuts. I’m giving up hope of ever feeling any better.

One of the things I’m really battling with is the sex. I willingly had, and enjoyed consensual sex. That is, I was making love to the man I adored, the man who’d told me he was single. When I finally found out that he had multiple ongoing longterm relationships, the sex that we had suddenly felt like rape. I hadn’t consented to sex with someone with multiple partners, and it was unprotected sex at that. What had been in my eyes, consensual, instantly became non-consensual because I’d consented to it with the person he presented himself as, single, madly in love with me to the exclusion of all others, and instead he was sleeping with different women several nights a week.

The other difficulty I have in moving on is the cognitive disonance, as in trying to marry up all the loving things he said and did with the cold hard persona that appeared once I’d discovered his other relationships and also the fact he was undoubtedly running the same charming and loving phrases past the other three women. It’s a total mind fuck, and has pretty much destroyed me.

Surely ten months on I should be feeling a little better, if anything I’m worse. I try to take care of myself with healthy eating and walking in the woods etc but those days are few, mostly I can barely drag myself out of bed, go for days without washing, have dinners that consist of wine and crisps, and keep turning down friends invitations and I hardly do any of the enjoyable activities that I used to love. I have zero energy and feel totally depleted and wrung out with occasional bouts of severe anxiety. Will this intense pain and confusion ever end?

    Moomin Mama

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