Trying to get out

What do you think would help you right now?

Woke up with the most HIDEOUS LONGING for "him." WHY am I longing for "a psychopath who tortured me without remorse"???!?!?!?!?!

Just lost in a see of those photos of him and he wife on ski vacations. I don't even ski.

Ugh.

Today I just woke up 100% sure I should call him and beg him to take me back! I don't know what the **** is wrong with me!

Ramona, you have gotten lots of advice and you are doing great with sitting with your feelings of longing. You made a resolution that you feel is in your best interest and have stuck to it, that is amazing. And as hard as it is, I agree with your decision.

So, how do you find the feelings or access them again? First you need to figure out what it was about him that triggered the feelings. This will require you to really investigate and dissect your history with him and with others you found attractive or drawn to. It might not be a quick task to complete and might be one best done with your T and possibly T3 because there might have been a layer of grooming that went on with T1 that she would see and T2 might miss.

You say his touch was electrifying, what were you feeling before that first touch? How long did you have feelings for him before that first touch? What was the topics/issues you were discussing around the time of that first touch? What was he saying/doing - being directive, empathetic, encouraging, suggestive, complimentary...

Also, think back - we are animals at our base, I firmly believe in pheromones and energy. Was there something about him from the very beginning or was it something that built over time? If it was something there from the beginning, you might need to be looking at oils and other scent items. Did he wear a cologne, if yes, did it remind you of someone else from your past?

At some point you will have to make the decision about your marriage, to disclose or not, is your husband enough or not, can your relationship change enough to meet these newly discovered desires/needs. AND.. this is a big and, maybe your husband has desires/needs that have been left undiscovered or unspoken - without talking openly about what occurred for you, you are not opening the door for your husband to talk about what occurred for him. From the sounds of it, for a short period of time, it sounded like your physical relationship with your husband was much different than before or after that period of time. I can only imagine that this affected your husband in some ways, as well. Your husband sounds supportive, so I hope at some point you'll be able to talk about elements of what happened and see if open communication doesn't help build a deeper relationship.

**DISCLAIMER: I have been in 3 relationships in my lifetime, the first was a friendship turned relationship. It was full of love but not passion. I left that one after 6 yrs for a very short lived passionate relationship. This relationship burned hot with love and anger and ended within 8 months. My 3rd relationship started out as a sexual relationship, we are at 18 yrs together now. Sexually we are very compatible; however, there is not a huge amount of passion (compared to my short lived one), there is a lot of love similar to my first relationship and I can't imagine my life without her. Neither of us are each other's physical type and we freely admit it. Going through my journey with my T, I found the person in my life that my wife represents, why I am drawn to her, what it is she brings to my life that I need. And I do need what she brings to my life. We do have a limited open relationship that neither of us has acted on in about 15 yrs. It took a lot of self exploration and discovery to find out what it is we each sexually like as well as what we each need in a relationship. Both of us had done some of this exploration before entering the relationship. It took lots of open communication once in the relationship to continue to flush things out - and we are still sorting them out even now, discovering things we didn't realize about ourselves. **

ETA: oh and why we say that these amazing feelings came from you is because you are the one that felt them. Sure other people and events can trigger us to feel a wide range of feelings... what we do feel comes from inside us.

I'm not the slightest bit interested seeing other men. Like,...at ALL. I want T1. Eric. That's it.

Strictly speaking, not entirely true. I think I remember you mentioning some guy at work you had a mild crush on.

A MILD CRUSH. I don't want to have sex with the guy. I don't want to see other people or have an open marriage or anything like that at all. My love is for T1. I'm not looking to slut around.

This is the email exchange I just had with T2.

I wrote him this, because the last couple of days have been pretty bad:

Hi T2:

I'm feeling pretty deeply freaked out these past few days--not that I wasn't before. But it just keeps ringing in my head, what that other therapist said "He is a psychopath who tortured you without remorse." She likened his behavior to raping a 5-year-old saying that the only missing piece was the actual physical intercourse. I am so frightened by what I let this man do to me and my family--for years--years and years filled with daylong panic attacks and terror. And I would have done anything to be with him. I gave him tens of thousands of dollars and my heart--to a psychopath. I don't know how I'll ever trust myself again. I ate up this man's lies and manipulations and mind****s like a starving woman at a Hometown Buffet--going back for more and more of the heat-lamp warmed, bacteria infested, low-grade dishes again and again and again and again and AGAIN.

I am SO scared. I don't know what to do about therapy--whether I should see you or this other woman or absolutely no one at all ever ever EVER again. The money I spent--the damage I let be done to me and my family.

I'm thinking back now to all the times he was dismissive of my pain, and a couple instances when he seemed almost amused by it. I am SO scared. I feel stunned and disoriented. It is very difficult to do much more than the absolute bare minimum that I have to to get through the day.

This man never cared for me at all. I was a plaything for his sick, sick twisted ego and an easy paycheck. I feel so sickened and afraid.

I am trying to write but keep staring off into space thinking of all the criticisms and judgments and flirtations and manipulations. It is very hard. I am so tired today that I feel like I'm going to fall down.

Thanks for listening.

He wrote me back this:

It’s a difficult situation you have. There is no direct advice I can give about who to see, of whether to see anyone at all, or who to trust.

1) You can’t really just choose to trust someone. You can just to not look at them too closely, but trust is something that arises by itself, over time, over experiences. Given that,
2) I don’t expect you to trust me. That I have known Eric as a colleague certainly muddies already muddy water.

Given what the other therapist said, there is one significant difference: you are not five, even if sometimes you felt very young.

What to pay attention to now - this is a good question. I remember you asking what responsibility you had in some of the experiences (the job you lost, some of the crappier people who said they were your friends) you’ve had, and I answered that it is your responsibility to defend yourself. That does not make any of what anyone else does your fault (their actions are entirely their own). It still just leaves you with the responsibility of self-defense.

I know that in each of these situations, your anger activated long before you were able to act on it. If I could encourage you to do anything, or help to do anything (besides talk to your husband), if would be this:

Become better friends with your anger.
I think your anger has a pretty sharp eye.

Ok, so tell me more about your love for Eric, what is it like? What would it be like to be with him?

How do you feel about his response? I think it's good that he acknowledges it could be hard for you to trust him because he knows Eric professionally. And that he says he can't tell you what to do. The thing about being better friends with your anger seems pretty good (and something like my MC would say!)

But the part about defending yourself feels off to me--it still feels like he's putting some of the blame on you, for not defending yourself more. And I don't think he should be putting *any* of the blame on you--that should fall on Eric.

I don't hear that. He clearly acknowledges that T1, and anyone who harms another person,is to blame, but he reminds Ramona that her best defense against people like him or like friends who do things to harm her is to get in touch with her anger and let it serve as her warning system and protection.

Those of us who were abused as children have an additional vulnerability because we have a tendency to revert to childlike responses to those who would manipulate us rather than remaining in our adult anger and defense. It happened to me, and one of the things I had to learn in therapy was to let my adult anger and intuition handle those kinds of situations defensively instead of defaulting to my 5-year-old vulnerability. That isn't blame; it was simply reality.

I don't think he was blaming. People who have been abused by powerful figures are NOT at fault and did NOT cause it to happen.. But we all have the responsibility to mAnage it in our own ways
Some choose drugs (like me) and other vices.. And some choose to heal... It's really up to the person what you want to make of these **** situAtions

No one is saying it's okay what happened to any of us

I really like his last part about anger.. Reminds me of something my therapist tells me all the time... Your anger is your wisdom.. Your anger is the part that knows it was very wrong and you were used and manipulated

It's those young under developed parts that long for it again and even miss it

I know some don't understand how you could miss something so awful but I get it ramona.. I do get that feeling and I was also in that plAce for a long time

The defending yourself thing made me think I'm going to fire him--that he does, indeed, blame me for this. I mean, I blame myself PLENTY--and the fact that he accidentally sent me those notes on the meditation he was writing for me where he said I betrayed my husband in my heart.

I'm so confused--because part of me agrees with him--that I was a willing participant in this nightmare--I woke up this morning once again trying to justify going back to Eric once a week, just to feel that sexual excitement again.

But honestly, I didn't know Eric was doing ANYTHING wrong until I started posting on here. And then I STILL didn't think he was doing anything wrong. And then I finally told a few friends about it and they said I was being abused and manipulated. And sometimes I STILL don't think he was doing anything wrong to this day. I miss him terribly.

I am SO ****ing confused. T3 compared me to a child rape victim. Whether it's an accurate description or not, you wouldn't tell ANY rape victim she should have done a better job defending herself, would you?

Ugh. I think T2's gotta go. ANOTHER ****ing loss. This is brutal.

Wow, this is SO beyond me right now. What your saying makes sense but I feel like I'm YEARS away from this!

It is still SO RARE I feel anger towards him. SO rare. This morning I was lying in bed trying to decide whether I should call him and start seeing him again so I can feel that electric excitement or wait two years so we can really "be together" according to the official rules of therapy.

I keep trying to replay some of the stuff from T3 in my head because she was very clear cut.

I told her about my feelings for him and she just said very simply: "You were tortured by this man. He is a psychopath who tortured you without remorse."

I keep trying to remind myself, then woke up this morning fantasizing about the ecstasy that would come with being with him. I'm still a real mess.

I Vacillated between these States too.... It's very common. I know it can be extremely confusing.... It took me maybe 2ish years to feel even a drop of anger

Hey Ramona, you're doing great. So much clearer and stronger when all this started.

Gentle question: given he'd be opening himself up to professional scrutiny of some kind if tall went wrong for him - do you think he would see you again?

Would T1 see me again? I have NO IDEA. He's already under professional scrutiny. I believe he attended a monthly training session with T2 last weekend and T2 has let him know he is deeply unimpressed with his work. When T2 consulted with another T about my case without revealing the people involved, the consulting T said: "Are you talking about Eric?" When T2 asked him why he would ask that, Consulting T said that Eric is known for screwing up majorly with at least one other case--not in a sexual manner--something about billing and sending a traumatized patient's bill to a collection agent or something like that--I don't know the details.

I have no idea if he'd see me again. T3 said that he is probably "scared shitless" that I'm going to report him, so he might be willing to see me again just so he could have some control in the situation again. Or he might know to just stay away. Or he might agree to see me again just because he doesn't want to piss me off because he thinks I might report him.

Today was filled with SO much reflection and confusion for me. I just kept thinking: "WHY? WHY did he do this?" And then I thought about the people who say he's a narcissist and liked the power and having his ego fed.

But THEN I think about the fact that when I was VERY suicidal he strongly encouraged me to tell other people, including T2 and my husband, about the entire situation. Many of the people on this board said "WTF? WHY would he want ANYONE to know about what he's done? He should be SCARED for anyone to know." So THAT makes me think that he really IS just completely clueless--incompetent, not malicious.

I thought of him today and was longing for him and then told myself: "Stop it, he didn't want you, he rejected you."

Then I hear him in my head saying multiple times: "But I'm NOT rejecting you. It's NOT that I don't want you. I've told you that I do. It's only because of the boundaries of therapy that we can't have wild, passionate sex right now."

So I think--oh,...he DID want me. Maybe he DID or DOES STILL have feelings for me? Does he ever think about me in a caring way or just grimace when I cross his mind as a potential career liability?

I am SO confused and turned around. And SO confused about what to do--T2 or T3? I think I need SOMEONE. I'm really feeling lost right now.

I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG for T1, and at the same time, I was thinking today about how much better my entire life is without him. The ALL DAY LONG PANIC ATTACKS I USED TO HAVE EVERY EFFING DAY--for YEARS. I was TORMENTED. This week I've had a couple of days where I've felt like things in my life are "OK." Like, deeply flawed, but not anything to kill myself over. My relationship with him made me suicidal, and I'm still scanning the streets for him and the aisles at the grocery store, because we live relatively close to each other.

Mostly I think about the sex--him kissing me deeply, me being naked in front of him, him kissing and licking my entire body, putting his fingers inside me, his **** inside me, the intensity of the screams that would come out of me.

And I think about lying with him in bed, asking him everything about himself--where he's from, what his life growing up was like, why he decided to become a therapist and leave the business world, what he likes, what he dislikes, what he dreams of.

I think of giving him oral sex between his session with other patients. I think of dressing up for him in crazy lingerie. I think of asking him what his wildest most twisted sexual fantasy is and would he allow me the privilege of letting him fulfill it with me.

That's what I think of.

I think of what it would be like to have a life with him, to come home to him every day, knowing that whatever tired, miserable things I had to deal with during the day, I'd come home to his electrifying touch.

I was tired and said I wanted to go to bed early and my husband just said out of the blue how sad he is we don't have sex the way we used to a couple months ago--that he felt like it was a rebirth in our relationship and he hates that it's over. He attributes it to us both being exhausted and sick (which we have both been a lot over the past 6 weeks) but it makes me feel sad that he really hasn't put together that the great sex stopped when I stopped seeing Eric.

It makes me even more confused about what to do. I just wanted sex when I was seeing him. And now that I'm not seeing him, I'm like--"meh."

It makes me REALLY question if I've done the right thing.

Ramona, you really don't need this man in the middle of your marriage.

I know it's hard to walk away: you're like like an addict hanging out for a fix. I've been there, I've felt the pain and the pull, and also how one leads to the other in an endless loop.

Here's an analogy, I don't know if it will help. But I'll try anyway. I quit drinking 6 weeks ago. I know my H is going to miss the 'drinking me', because I was so much more relaxed and fun and sociable and would actually stay up with him after 9pm.

Does it mean I should keep drinking unhealthy amounts of wine to maintain the closeness? No. What it does mean is that I need to find ways to be sociable and fun and awake and engaged in the evenings without getting drunk. I don't know what the solution is. I just know that a bottle of wine every week-night and two on the weekends is not it, because it brings way too much risky and damaging baggage with it. And so I sit here each night with my hot chocolate and think some more about how I am going to achieve what the wine was doing for me. So far, I have no idea. But a great deal of the rest of the planet seems to have worked out how. So I am thinking it has to come to me some time.

These are your feelings, they belong to you. If he has sparked them, then they are able to be sparked again. But maybe in a different, non-addictive sort of a way, in an equal relationship with a person who cares about you enough to respect you and your boundaries and your rights to some pretty fundamental things. The T that you fantasize about is not doing any of that: by stepping out of his professional role he is abdicating his responsibilities towards you and making it impossible for you to get what you deserve - the healthy therapeutic relationship you went there for. He's basically blown up your therapy with his carelessness. And that's not OK.

The reason I asked if he would see you again is that there is a cold reality here, which you
identified it yourself: you ARE a career-threatening liability to him now, and chances are pretty good that he will not want to do anything that puts him further at risk of trouble. You need to really think that through: the T in your head that is longing for you and pining for you and ready to throw it all away for you likely doesn't even exist any more.

Whatever feelings he may or may not have had for you in the past are likely to have changed, because he now HAS to defend and protect himself and his position. I found that really hard to accept about my ex T, and I don't think to this day that I accept it. But whatever warmth and genuine connection we had is long gone. It was gone from the minute that I raised the first whisper of 'I don't think this is OK but I don't want it to end..' and the true nature of our relationship was revealed. It had been about her and her needs for a very long time.

I think it's the same for your T, and he has shown very clearly that your needs are completely irrelevant to him. I know that there is a part of us that doesn't care about that and that is willing to put aside our own wishes and desires to get whatever crumbs we can out of these relationships. But that's not how it's meant to be. And it's not the mutual give and take that your fantasy describes so well - of you giving him pleasure, him returning it, and the gentle everydayness of a relationship between equals.

No healthy relationship can survive on one person desperately longing for connection from an other who is feeling threatened and cornered. The fantasies you describe above, about being close and having a mutually gentle and loving relationship may have felt like they could be fulfilled before ...but you can almost guarantee that this man - despite whatever lack of insight he had into his behaviour earlier - cares only about defending himself from you now. And with people like this...their need for professional standing and saving face and protecting themselves trumps everything including whatever sexual feelings may or may not have been stirred in them as a result of them not being able to hold their professional position as you explored what this working relationship had sparked in you.

For what it's worth, I don't think you should tell your husband. These feelings are not something that other people understand easily - they are so primal and complex, and they don't even really belong in the today-world. They should always have been contained within the safety of the therapy room and worked with carefully and delicately. These feelings that arose within the context of this deep and intense working relationship may not even have been about ex T. I suspect for those of us who get this stuck...they never are. They are rooted somewhere way back when, and come to the surface only in this very unique environment. So I don't think you should tell H, because even though you think you know what these feelings are about...you might not, just yet. And you risk introducing something into your marriage that should always have had a beginning, middle and end and been contained so carefully, away from your real life.

To this day, my H blames me for ending our sex life - it basically died when I was with T, and so confused and overwhelmed, and it never really came back. He blames me for rejecting him over that time and having what was essentially an emotional affair, and for inserting T into our real life. She has never really left. I honestly think I could have worked through this and we could have resolved it if those had always just been feelings...not really attached to an identifiable person.

I don't know how to get it all back now with H, but what I do know is...those feelings were not about *T*. They were about what she represented. Having them stop and take shape and become solid and real, when they should always have been symbolic and fluid, stopped them in their tracks and stranded them in my real life, and left me holding them.

Your ex T should not have been in your life outside of the T room, point blank. But because of his arrogance and dismissal of some pretty fundamental professional tenets, he inserted himself into your real world.

The real tragedy is, by now he has probably woken up to his own reality and realised that he has put himself in a risky and messy position leaving you as the only person really left in the relationship, which can very likely only ever exist in the confines of your head.

I'm sorry, I feel really harsh for writing these words, but I think you need to get out of your head and come down to earth and connect back to what is real and here and true NOW in your world. That is what will endure and be there for you beyond this 'high' that you are caught in. Please don't blow up what is good and solid in your world for a fantasy person who may or may not even exist.

You have done the right thing. It was not right that this other man ended up in the middle of your marriage. It is time to find your way back to your husband and your child.

Those all sound like wonderful, loving things to have with someone. It must be hard that it sometimes seem like those things could have happened with this person you formed a connection with and it can't. And it must be hard that reality feels so different from these things you think about.

(((Slowandgentle)))

Thanks for taking the time, energy, and effort to write this response to me. And congrats on your 6 weeks sober--it sounds like we both quit our addictions right around the same time.

You're right that the fantasies I have about T1 will never, ever come true and that whatever feelings he ever had for me are now gone because he certainly doesn't care enough about me to risk anything now that he's woken up to how badly he ****ed up.

It hurts SO MUCH to realize I'll never fulfill those fantasies. It's like giving up on your greatest dream. It's heartbreaking. To realize he'll never hold my hands again or tell me how he wishes he could be with me but can't, those are the thoughts that open up the black hole inside of me and make it hard to go on.

T2 says that the T1 I think I'm "in love with" doesn't even exist. He says I have seen this very tiny sliver of this man and have created a fantasy around him that doesn't exist. He doesn't know I've seen the wife's Facebook page, but even putting that in, I've really only seen TWO slivers of this man, and have no idea who he is in real life.

I keep telling myself: "He's not real. It's like being in love with a character from a novel. It's not real."

But it hurts so much--to find out once again that this wonderful thing I felt was all a mirage--it's very much like the job loss I had that started off my whole depression--I was a member of a very prestigious and somewhat famous comedy troupe and thought I was on my way to becoming a professional in the entertainment world then got thrown in the cold with a shrug of "did you really think you were important--ya big dummy." It's like the same thing happened all over again, with T1 being like: "Did you REALLY think I cared about you? Ya big dummy."

And to realize he'll never touch me and hold me and make love to me and tell me about his life--it's such a LOSS.

And the lies to my husband will continue--I agree with you that it's not right to tell him, at least not now. I'm not ready. I'm still mourning the loss of "the love of my life."

T2 keeps pressuring me to tell him. T3 says it sounds like I'm not ready. I just can't find my anger towards him. It's just longing longing longing.

Will have to do my best with sex with my husband tonight. I'll be drinking a lot before.

I can't enjoy sex without thinking about T1. It's going to be a really ****ed up night.