I have to delve deeper into Brian 2 and what that relationship was and how it created the version of me that was so susceptible to the next psychopath who came along. Brian 2 was a diagnosed psychopath.
Brian 2 was a physicist. A PhD. He was unable to get security clearance at one point because he was a sexual psychopath. He failed the psych evaluation for the security clearance. I think it was either a DOD or a CIA thing because DOE is usually easy to get. I know he told me; I just don’t remember, and I don’t want to misstate anything.
On one of our first outings, I almost died. I believe I have told this story before, but we were going across a tiny, like 4” ledge on a mountain, and my foot slipped on some ice and I would have plummeted to my death if it hadn’t been for this little tree growing out of the rock face. When I fell, I reached for him and I looked at him. He didn’t reach for me, and he looked at me with the most horrified look on his face, but it was... wrong. It looked like a bad soap opera actor feigning horror at watching his girlfriend at the time go splat.
It’s called mirroring. Many psychopaths, being incapable of actually feeling some of these emotions, mimic what they see others do. He was not concerned I was about to die. I’m fairly certain—or at least I got the feeling—that he thought having a girlfriend die in a tragic accident would be good for him.
Moving on in our relationship, this act of mirroring became more personal to me. He did what I always referred to as “stealing my emotions.” He would take me being scared or me running away and twist the narrative in such a manner as to become the victim rather than the perpetrator. He would steal expressions on my face. He would flinch like I did when I thought a punch was being thrown. My PTSD—which looking back on it was a fucking cake walk in those days—was his PTSD. I punched him in the face once. I was backed into the closet and it was reaction. But he would, after that, start crying and asking me if I was going to beat him again. He backed me into a closet. I fought.
God, the memories of sobbing in the back of that fucking closet all those times.
I couldn’t leave. He had a tracker on my phone. If I tried to just get into my own car and drive, just to have a second, he would sit behind the car. Once or twice he made it seem like he had given up and walked away, but then once I started backing out he threw himself at my truck and said I tried to run over him. I think that happened twice. At least I could lock myself in my car.
He isolated me from my friends and family. The day everything finally went down between him and I, it was around 6 a.m. He was having his necrophilia fantasy and it would be really cold in the room and I had to be perfectly still and limp for him. My mom called. He got hysterical. My mom was calling to tell me that my grandma was in really bad shape and they weren’t expecting her to make it through the week.
I would probably still be with Brian 2 if it hadn’t been for my grandma. That fight—the one that culminated in him telling the police I had threatened him with a gun, which again never fucking happened—lasted about 36 hours. Screaming. Yelling. Crying. I unloaded on him about everything he had done. When angry enough, I throw things. I was angry enough. Not at like someone’s head or something, but shit will fly when I’m that pissed.
He was trying to make me leave the house and kick me out again, as usual, and I stood my ground. I said, no, this is my home too. You have somewhere to go, go there. I needed to figure out logistics and calls with my mom getting updates on my grandma. That’s why he had me put on the psych hold. It was to get me out of the house so I couldn’t claim it as residence. He had divorced me the year before because I wouldn’t talk after that kid got hit by the car. I had no legal rights to my home unless I was already in it. So he got me out.
My dad came and was dealing with him, and my dad believes anything negative people have to say about me. I told my dad I wanted my jewelry. Nope—Brian had given it to me. But legally it was mine, and there was this Tiffany’s necklace from my kids. Three keys. I had owned it for years. That was the one I really wanted.
Then Brian showed my dad his credit card bills and said I had cost him all this money on plane tickets for the kids. We would put the tickets on his Amex for the points because I bought a lot of plane tickets for the boys. I would then immediately pay him the money for the tickets. Why tell my dad that? My furniture? No—he said he was still paying it off. No, he wasn’t. He was doing crypto mining and he had a good setup and I sold like 10k worth of units I helped him build and my cut was my dining room table. Yeah, didn’t get that. My dad wouldn’t stand up for me for anything. I walked away with my car, some of my clothes, my heirloom furniture, and little else. When I got out of the hospital it was all in a storage unit.
About a year later, having become housing stable after my time living in my car and the weekly hotels, I finally emptied the storage unit and looked in the boxes. In every box there was one thing that provoke a memory and it was completely random to the box. He literally packed my boxes in a way to harm me emotionally. I still have them under {LP}'s bed. I only looked in them that one time.
The good news was, my grandma rallied and made it another month. She died August 6th of 2018. We sang her show tunes all night and I pushed the morphine because my mom and my sister couldn’t. I bathed her after and got her dressed for them to come take her away. I watched her zipped into a body bag. She saved me from Brian. She saved me a lot of other times, but her last act was saving me.
And that really awesome California surfer boy I had gone out with, who made me promise I would see him again, never fucking texted me. We had been on three dates between the end with Brian 2 and my grandma dying. Strangely, he was going to an insurance conference in Boston and I was going to DC to watch my grandma die. We said goodbye from the airport and he never texted me. It would be a year or so before we reconnected. I was off to the next psychopath.
I spent several years trying to shut myself down. I was being told from the Brian 2 events that I was crazy. No one understood what I was saying. So I submitted to it. It had to be me. I was overmedicated. I would convince myself that my thoughts weren’t rational. I would defer to anybody else at all, no matter what they said. I knew I was the one doing it “wrong,” and they clearly knew better than me. I was drugged into nothingness. Because I was misdiagnosed and mislabeled because no one would listen. And I turned it on myself, and that was probably the worst part. A lot of that I did to me.
I came out of it. I hit some really hard times. I was living in my car, and I slowly built my life back and found some of my self-esteem. I got a new therapist and they were simply aghast about what I had gone through with my therapist before. It was recommended to me to sue her for malpractice. So a little validation there. I wasn’t as crazy as I thought I was. I had some decent years in between it all. I got stronger. Then it all came crashing down once more because of that same goddamn blue-eyed California surfer boy.
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