Two posts in two days! IC asked if I was afraid of H's spewing because I thought he might be physically abusive or if it was something else. An echo of Sage's question. I've been thinking about that. I'm having a hard time articulating my thoughts. The psychological aspect almost feels worse to me—the gaslighting, the constant cognitive dissonance of living with someone who says the last seventeen years were not real. It seems he finds some other aspect to rewrite the longer this goes on, so maybe that's part of it. I'm always on high alert even when I think I'm not. It's not only that he says in so many ways our R wasn't real because he never really loved me or I never really loved him (and I know I can choose to trust my own experience, as difficult as that is sometimes); it's also that his actions and behavior reinforce that unreality. How could my memories be accurate, I think; how could he both be the person who did and said x, y, z over the years, and the person who's done and said all that he's done in the last two? It gets harder for me to grasp the more extreme his behavior gets. MLC and/or personality disorder, I remind myself, but I could do all the reading in the world and understand this intellectually and at the end of the day I can replay a good memory from our M in my head and compare it to what's happening now, and it just doesn't make sense on an emotional level. It's like my brain is still trying to integrate all of this information: H was a person who I trusted, who I felt safe with, and now H is the opposite.
IC's question. I don't think he would get physical, but when it comes down to it, I don't know this person; I can't say anymore with any confidence what he would or would not do. He's now outright lying in order to support this crazy idea that I defrauded him, or he's going along with his L's idea to lie, or he actually believes the lies. All of these possibilities are unsettling to me. I see what Sage was getting at in an earlier post—can I separate the emotion from this and just think of him as a person who really wants to avoid any responsibility of owing me anything, this is all a business deal for him, etc? I'm struggling with this, because he's willing to lie about something so personal and private as a means to this end, or if he has actually come to believe it... maybe it is more the fragmentation of this other I thought I knew as well as myself that scares me?