[QUOTE=Bill3;5775492]What does your psychiatrist say about the intrusive thoughts?

her basic advice is to get up and do something that interferes with the thought, to short circuit it. which is difficult for me to do in the middle of the night, so i usually just lie there and ruminate on the thought, making everything worse.


What are the pros and cons of trusting her?

Good question. Pros, if I could trust her, I guess all these bad dreams would go away and we could have a so-called normal relationship. Con: well, anything goes. since she manages to do everything in such a way that she appears innocent, she could still be doing the dic pick thing and i'd never know unless i snoop again. or be in touch with her no-contact ex. or similar.
i do think she carries a lot of secrets with her.

How long has she been seeing her therapist? What is your impression of her progress or lack thereof in therapy?

She's been seeing her current therapist for several years now. i'm not sure what progress she's made. i know she got out of her relationship with the narcissist ex while with her. but i also know that she's continued to see me while seeing her too. most therapists would tell her to run from a guy with my issues. i think my gf uses her mostly as a sounding board. i'm not sure any actual therapy, as you and i understand it, is going.


Could you please remind me what she has lied about, leaving aside the **** pic situation?

1 / the one where she wrote a letter to her best friend saying she'd done a terrible thing and called her ex and he came over. in her version, she'd written that in error, when in fact all she'd done, she says, was write her ex to reaffirm her vow of no-contact. nothing spurred her to write him, she says, but abject loneliness. and then he showed up at her door two days later with gifts to return some of her belongings, she says, uninvited.

2/ after a week or two of sobriety, i sent her a text wondering why she'd never said anything about it or congratulated me or anything. two seconds later, she texted back: of course i have! a lot! i'm so proud of you and i've texted you that repeatedly! i pointed out that she hadn't and after a moment of scrolling back to past texts, she apologized. the matter is a small one. what bothers me is that her instinctive, knee-jerk reaction was to cover her butt with a lie. another instance of needing to appear innocent.

3/ she says she got her boob job (ddd!!!) just to make herself feel better and constantly puts down other women who use it to make themselves more appealing to men. but, of course, she used a boobilus pic of herself to further entice the 29 year old. and on the dating site, she used a similar shot until the replies became overwhelming, then she stopped for a while, then she used it again.
this isn't so much a lie as an indication of how her actions can be so at variance with her words.

4/ there's more but they escape me at the moment.

Well something happening once would not mean that she was "into it". How many other such incidents are you aware of?

Actually, none, other than by inference, which of course can be wrong. I do know she was "conversing" with other OKC guys at the time. I do know that the dic pick incident went on for a while. it wan't just the train ride. how long it lasted, I don't know. from what i can gather, two weeks at least. but at some point he turned into a stalker, so she ended it. I base being "into it" on her willingness to continue the back and forth over a period of time.

she could have been emotionally upset about stuff at the time, but one of my bigger concerns is similar to the one i have about her boob job justication. her actions with the pic thing are so incredibly at variance with the woman she says she is and has always been. like 180 degrees different. this is something that infects my dreams. and i sometimes look at her, trying to find that other her, and can't. but that's one of the benefits of having the kind of separate selves that she has. she can behave one way at one time and another way at another time and between the two of them find a rational for it that makes her seem like the innocent she needs to be. so, that could be going on right now and i'd never know it....
but i might suspect it, because of the lies she told to try to dust it away as the actions of a naive soul who thought it was a game, when it's clear she knew exactly what she was doing.

It can be okay to hesitate in the face of complicated, varied, and conflicting information. How well can you tolerate waiting, hesitating?

hihistorically, not good at all. but that's when booze was involved. i do know that i am leaking at the edges. made a comment about the 10" **** once. when she said, i can't unhear something I've heard, about something funny she heard, I said, yeah know you know what it's like for me when i can't unread something i've read.

she groaned and ignored what i said.

and then there are my infected dreams, which suggests my tolerance level must be pretty low.

i dunno, man. i have no idea if all of this is worth the stress and strain.