Dear Dr. Romance: the worst nightmare of my life

Dear Dr. Romance:

It's been months since I wrote to you and received your very excellent advice. In the meantime I was able to get therapy, and . Since then I have slowly been recovering from the worst nightmare of my life.

I want to thank you for the information that my spouse is a narcissistic individual because knowing what is going on with his personality helped me to recover my own sense of well-being. I just couldn't understand how I missed all the clues regarding this man for so many years. Now I have begun to see things very clearly. Obviously he never loved me but in many ways he needed me and relied heavily upon me for whatever was missing in himself.

I believe he is totally incapable of love and is parasitic in nature. I also have come to the conclusion that people like him must control others but the passive-aggressive side of him created a covert form of this control. He sabotaged every pla I made. He constantly behaved as if he had no common sense and his work was often laced with ineptitude. He destroyed our property constantly but it always seemed like this happened because of an oversight or procrastination. He stole money from his job when he knew that the post office had installed a video camera. However, when questioned about that he said that he had forgotten about the video camera and had thought that the post office had removed it.

Sabotage, bank fraud, costly mistakes that ruined two of my businesses, and money that just disappeared...his actions kept me in poverty, isolated out in the country away from my family and friends and I realize now that his actions also prevented me from leaving him. Once he began to realize that my feelings for him had changed and I was considering a divorce, he became extremely cooperative and deceptive. He wasn't going to let me leave him but he planned to get out of the marriage himself and he planned to leave me destitute.

My lawyer plans to nail this scoundrel in the courts and to expose him for the type of person he really is. Again, I want to thank you for the help and advice you gave me during that time of sheer desperation. I hope that some of what I have written about this man can be used in some way to help someone else. I am reminded of the song by Billy Joel...The Stranger....for that is what I realized I had spent my life with........a cold, calculating stranger.

Dear Reader:

I'm so glad to hear you're taking care of yourself. I'm rooting for you. Understand that he really did not remember the post office video camera, because narcissists can rewrite reality to suit their wish fulfillment. So, he wanted the video camera to not be there, and presto! in his mind, it wasn't. That's how narcissists mostly get caught. You can't ignore reality forever -- it comes back and bites you in the butt. Just remember, all the skills you developed in dealing with him are valuable,and life post-narcissist is much easier than life with him.

"Getting Out of Your Own Way" and "Your Primary Relationship" will help in building your new life. It Ends With You: Grow Up and Out of Dysfunciton will show you how to repair the emotional damage.

For low-cost counseling, email me at tina@tinatessina.com