abusive friendship

4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

10. Grief

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on July 9, 2010October 21, 2022

Richard reveals his wife’s abuses

Ever since we first decided on plans for him to stay with us (the original plan was that he’d crash for a couple of days or weeks while looking for a job and apartment), he began telling me things about his wife that made me uncomfortable at first.

First there was the filthy living. He even wrote in his public Myspace blog that what would be between him and his wife, remained to be seen.

I won’t go into all of the details here in my public story, or everything that happened while he was here, but things between them were very bad. Jeff and I were there for Richard, supporting him emotionally through all this, putting me on a constant, exhausting emotional roller coaster.

He said she abused him emotionally, that emotional abuse is as lethal as physical, because of the stress.

He complained she was mean to him over the phone. His family was there at the time; when they scolded her for it, she scolded him for not sticking up for her! Say what?

(My ex Phil did the same thing to me after embarrassing me to my friends–then getting a different response from them than he hoped for.)

I witnessed a screaming fight that scared and shocked me. They argued over the phone all the time.

At first, his wife and children stayed with her family. He said that without him there to keep her in check, she and her mother both verbally abused the children.

He said Tracy screamed at the kids all the time. He kept asking her on the phone, “Why are the girls crying?” He explained how each girl reacted to abuse, such as one who comforted the abused one.

Her family was very narcissistic and abusive. Todd called them all “nuts.”

Tracy’s father was a con man and molester. Richard told Todd that her mother had borderline personality disorder (BPD) and multiple personalities.

Richard hated her mom and how she got coddled for all the crap she kept pulling.

He told me that Tracy and all her sisters were like their mother to varying degrees, though Tracy was the “good” one who didn’t have as much of it.

He told Todd, too, that Tracy had many of her mother’s traits. However, Todd told me she actually has all the traits, but Richard puts her on an undeserved pedestal.

Richard called Tracy a mean girl and queen bee.

One time, he said he deliberately married a mean girl because she was different from the subservient women he usually dated.

Yet another time, he said he married her because she believed in wifely submission. He said he’d jokingly tell his other girlfriends to submit, and they’d say, “In your dreams!” (An example of his baffling doublespeak.)

I wondered why on earth Tracy took the girls to stay with her parents with that kind of history, especially her dad. I cheered when she finally escaped and took them to Richard’s mother’s house.

But I didn’t realize she soon would bring all this–the kids, the drama, the abuse–into my own house for six weeks instead of staying with her in-laws.

Even though Richard had been with us for two months already, I didn’t mind him staying longer. My husband felt crowded, but I loved the company. I also felt needed, nurturing my best friend through a difficult time, doing all I could to help him so he could get back on his feet–and back with his wife and children ASAP.

As a shy introvert with NVLD, it’s hard to hold conversations with most people, but with him I could talk freely and easily, like an extrovert. For someone like me, this is a rare gem, while for extroverts it’s Thursday.

It had been a long time since I had a friend like this in my own town. And ever since 2010, I’ve had no one here in my town with whom I can talk like I talked with him.

I do have some friends and family with whom I can talk like that, but they live far away.

With him, I could talk this way every day, for hours, on all sorts of different subjects, especially Goth music, Orthodoxy and religious backgrounds! Even with some of my best, longtime friends, I struggle to talk like this.

It was fun having him here. We got along great.

His mother, unlike her mother, is a great person, from what I hear. She also had a huge house with lots of room. The family could have been fine living with her.

The original plan was for Tracy and the kids to stay out in their original state with Richard’s mother, until a new apartment was secured and all their things were moved in.

But then one day, Richard just sprung on us a change: Tracy bought plane tickets that were on discount for a limited time. She and the three children were coming to stay in my house!

This was never part of the agreement, because we lived in an 1100-square-foot house, had no spare bedroom or beds, and already Richard slept on the couch!

Instead, they all got stuck in this little place. I felt forced into this, like I had no say in the matter. I had no idea how long they would stay.

I wondered why she didn’t stay with his family until he saved up enough money for a security deposit on an apartment, instead of coming up here where there was no place for them to live.

It also caused them some issues that never would’ve been a problem if she had waited.

I said it would be too crowded, too noisy, and I’d have nowhere to go to get peace. It was going to disturb the peace and quiet, our settled routines and ways of doing things.

We did not have the room or resources; Richard already taxed our pocket book.

I told Jeff she screamed at the kids, and I didn’t want this in my house, or the arguing. My loyalty and protectiveness for friends emerged.

But Jeff saw it as an adventure, Tracy was determined because of fare rate increases, and Richard was anxious to see his girls again.

So did anybody listen to me? Noooo….Even though it was my house and not theirs, I felt I had no say in the matter, especially since Jeff didn’t seem to mind.

Richard wanted his family to discover the serenity of my house. He didn’t think things through, obviously: How can you bring another adult and three little children into this tiny house and still have serenity?

I didn’t even know these people! I had been friends with Richard for two years already (online and on the phone) when he came to stay with us, but I had never met the rest of the family except online.

Nobody knew how we would get along. We had no place for all these people to sleep, no privacy at all.

But nobody listened. Richard and Tracy just went ahead and did what they wanted to, and Jeff was easygoing and didn’t see the problem, so I was overruled. Which was odd, since Jeff felt crowded with just Richard staying there.

So I grabbed some apartment listings and tossed them to Richard, asking him to please find something ASAP.

Around January 1, Jeff said I was very perceptive and brilliant, and he should have listened. (Now, in 2012, he tells me that he thought I had approved it! So if I didn’t, and he didn’t, then who did?)

“Surprise, we’ve decided to bring the family and stay with you for the weekend.” Anyone anywhere on the -vert spectrum could find such a declaration objectionable, but it’s more likely to bring an introvert to a boil, according to Nancy Ancowitz.
Introverts count on their downtime to rejuvenate their resources; an extended presence in their homes robs them of that respite. —Laurie Helgoe, PhD, “Revenge of the Introvert”

Tracy and the kids flew in on December 4, Richard went to fetch them to a hotel, and they arrived here the following day.

Table of Contents

4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

10. Grief

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on July 8, 2010September 16, 2022

Discovering they live in squalor

After they moved out, they lived in squalor, no matter how nice the place was at first. I feared for their children, growing up in a place like that, especially for their health because of the lack of sanitation. It could be considered child neglect!

Tracy got furious whenever Richard insisted that she help out more around the house, that he couldn’t do it all himself and take care of all their kids. A mutual friend also saw this for himself. I’ve been told that the house got so filthy in their last city, that the state had to step in, though I won’t go into detail on what the state did.

Yet Tracy complained about me doing housework when she lived in my house, as if she expected me to sit on my butt all day talking to her and somehow the house would be clean.

When Richard described the house he was living at before he moved to our place, it sounded like hoarding and/or squalor conditions: Cockroaches and mice running around. Trash piled up. Black mold. The kids named one of the cockroaches, like a pet. The kids also hoarded food in their rooms, not snacks but lunchmeat.

But whether they were technically hoarders or not, wherever they lived was soon filthy and stinky and looked like a dump, whether a broken-down old house or a 10-year-old apartment. Even their vehicle had the same stench, and was full of trash and stains.

Even the mutual friend–a bachelor!–called their house disgusting, and still mentions it from time to time, especially if somebody accuses him of bad housekeeping.

Richard was delayed moving into our house because he had to throw out so much trash and mold-ruined clothes.

I went to the trouble of extra-cleaning the house before he arrived, so he could go from squalor to nice. My son and I even cleaned the marks off the walls, including his drawings.

Unfortunately, one or two of those cockroaches apparently hitched a ride with Richard, as much as he tried to avoid it, because I saw a couple of cockroaches in my clean house for the first time ever in my entire life. I sprayed and set out traps, and never saw them before or since November 2007.

In 2010 or 2011, I developed a fascination for shows about hoarders, because of this exposure to real-life squalor and trash hoarding. What I saw looked familiar, not so much the hoarding as the poor housekeeping.

I wanted to see if their behavior qualified, and what drives people to live like this.

I have also seen many toilets on these shows which look just like Richard and Tracy’s–the element of their squalor which most horrified me and probably caused most of their stomach bugs.

That thing must have been infested with e-coli with all the fecal matter covering the seat and floor. I mean, come on, when your own children’s health is at stake because they must sit every time they use the toilet–CLEAN IT!

I am a housewife, ever since my son was born. Before that, I worked part-time. My husband and son have always made a clutter-free house impossible, and my husband slacked off on his own chores all the time, but (in the eyes of everyone except my mother-in-law) I have always kept a clean house.

Not neat, but clean. No mounds of trash, and bathrooms cleaned weekly. At least, when I was in charge of cleaning them. But even when my husband did that, I still spot-cleaned the toilets daily, so nobody had to fear using them.

Being exposed to their squalor drove me to be even cleaner, as if staving off the horror of my house becoming like theirs. I use their house as a bugbear for my son, what will happen to his future place if he doesn’t clean it. I joke that I’ll spank him if I come visit and it looks like theirs. He wrinkles his nose and says he doesn’t want it to be like theirs.

I even felt a bit traumatized, so when I told my mom that we broke off relations with them, I finally poured out to her by e-mail and phone the filth I had experienced. I also needed to talk about the filth with Todd. I had to purge it, just as I do the entire abusive experience through this memoir.

Already I never knew what to expect in other people’s bathrooms, but this made me especially nervous when visiting other friends. I fear such squalor anywhere I go, even though I haven’t seen it since. I feel immense relief even if a bathroom hasn’t been cleaned recently, because it still is nowhere near the horror of Richard’s toilet and bathroom floor.

They didn’t have mounds of stuff in the living room, or bugs in the refrigerator, but there were unsanitary conditions.

Even the chairs and couches all had what looked like brown butt-marks, as if the filth from the toilet seat had been ground into them, so I had to force down revulsion just to sit down. (This cause of the marks was plausible. Don’t ask how I know this.)

The dishes, pots and pans piled in the sink often looked like they’d been sitting there for some time, with food long since dry and stuck to them.

The house smelled like decaying trash and body odor. The bathroom sink was neglected like everything else, cluttered with stuff and filthy, and once I even found a disposable diaper in it and couldn’t use it. And that was the only bathroom, so how were people supposed to wash their hands?

Jeff said the condition of the house was even worse when they expected only him and not me, which made him feel like he wasn’t worth cleaning up for. (They said they cleaned for me, and I thought, “This is clean?”)

Jeff was also disgusted by the toilet. It also sounds like the mutual friend saw even worse conditions than I did. It sounds like I never saw just how bad it could really get, because they cleaned up for me.

But from what Richard, the mutual friend and Jeff told me, there was indeed trash hoarding along with unsanitary conditions. Maybe “cleaned up” means they pitched the trash.

In my house, they left a huge pile of dirty laundry (including underwear!) on my living room floor!

First Richard started doing this, so I got disgusted and bought him a frickin’ laundry basket. But he only put clean laundry in there, and still piled the gross dirty stuff on my floor. ARGH!

But being a nice hostess, and already starting to fear his sarcastic wit (such as calling me Mom for wanting him to call if he’s going to be late in a snowstorm), I wasn’t assertive about it.

In fact, once I did try to get him to clean it up, he called me pushy, I apologized, then he laughed at me. (This is a narcissistic trait: backwards reactions to things.)

When Tracy arrived, I hoped she would get him to improve his hygiene and habits, but hers turned out to be just as bad (she bathed every three days), and the laundry pile stayed put.

I didn’t feel comfortable hinting at her like I did at him, since with him I felt as comfortable as a twin sister, but she was scary. (Once, when they visited after moving out, I had to re-wash a freshly washed blanket after she used it. It stank that bad. I sometimes wonder if they bathed even less often after moving out.)

Day after day I kept telling them when my laundry was done, but they still neglected their laundry, until they reached crisis levels. If I tried to help, I was treated like I was creepy.

After they moved out, I vacuumed and wiped up the carpet before I could feel okay walking around there. Then I saw them make the same pile (including underwear) on their own living room floor!

When they lived with us, I had to clean up after the adults and the children every time they used the bathroom. I don’t want to go into a lot of disgusting detail, but this was not your usual ick left behind by the inconsiderate person ahead of you.

No, this was a dusting of filth all over the toilet and floor, or various other leavings, depending on who it was and what happened. Didn’t they see it?

So I was constantly busy cleaning the bathroom, constantly using bathroom wipes. (We went through four tubes of wipes a week!)

As the months passed after they moved out, I noticed whenever I used their bathroom that nobody kept up with it like I did–and the toilet and the floor around it grew worse and worse all the time. There were layers of filth! I’ve seen toilets on hoarder shows that remind me of this.

I feared for the health of those little girls. I also feared what kind of crap (literally) they were tracking around the house on their feet.

I don’t consider myself excessively clean, but they already considered me practically OCD (I suppose I am in comparison), and I wanted to be a good guest, so I bit my tongue, swallowed my revulsion, and sat on the couches/chairs anyway. Then changed my clothes when I got back home.

I began holding it in for as long as I could whenever we went over there. But sometimes, I couldn’t help using the toilet.

But first, I was forced to use wet toilet paper and soap to scrub the seat, the front of the toilet under the seat, and floor as best I could, so that filth would not get on my skin and clothes.

Even that could not fully clean it, and all that caked-on filth, left black stains behind. The bathtub was also neglected.

I wondered if they even noticed the smell or how filthy it was in the bathroom–another question I have when watching hoarder shows. Other friends occasionally have dirty or cluttered houses, but nothing close to this. Hoarders do not seem to notice the filth, because they live day-to-day in conditions that require others to wear hazmat suits! And get angry when others remark on the filth!

Richard kept cancelling (at the last minute) some get-together we planned for the two families, because some child had a nasty stomach bug. Richard blamed it on the cold weather; I knew the real reason: the lack of sanitation in their bathroom.

As an SCA person with geek friends, I have been in homes where the housework was low on the priority list, and am used to turning a blind eye to such things; I have been in a gaming store in which the bathroom was apparently kept up by apes; but I have never seen anything like what was in their bathroom.

From what I saw and was told by others, including Richard, an appalling level of filth was normal in their household, not just in my city but before they moved there. They moved twice while I knew them, and both places ended up looking exactly the same over time–even an apartment which was only maybe 10 years old!

They kept pointing the finger at each other, or at the kids. I wondered how two grown adults, at least one (usually two) of which was unemployed the whole time I knew them, could have no time to clean.

What did they do all day if they weren’t at work? If they lacked money for cleaning supplies/wash machines, why not wash clothes in the tub and use vinegar to clean?

When Tracy’s mother visited them for a few weeks, and started cleaning the place, Richard and Tracy got furious with her. I felt sorry for her, forced to stay in this place for so long, but not allowed to clean it.

I also see this reaction on hoarding shows, as the hoarder screams at people for throwing away rat-pee-covered books.

I got yelled at just for wiping honey off a table before setting down my books; Jeff got yelled at for helping clean up because the place would still be a mess when he got there; I got snapped at for giving Jeff a bottle of wipes to clean up after our son when he used the bathroom.

Richard made me feel like I had deeply insulted him by giving my son those wipes, that I implied his bathroom was not clean.

Well…even though the wipes were to clean up after my son, who was still potty training…instead of feeling insulted when people point out the obvious truth, just clean the frickin’ thing!

Even when they gave me a blanket during the winter, I often had reason to believe it was not clean, from what fell off it onto the table. (I don’t want to be more specific on the Web).

Between this and the cramped conditions of their apartment/house compared to our own two-story condo and the field out back, where kids could freely roam and play and make noise without annoying the adults–I kept wishing they would come to our house more often.

(Heck, my house was even cleaner now because I had to stave off the specter of being like their house, and “cleanse” myself of it.) Our house was a lot roomier without eight people sleeping in it and a mountain of dirty laundry in the living room.

But Tracy complained about our cats making her allergic (another reason that Richard bringing his family into my house to stay for a while was a very bad idea), and they wanted to play D&D on their dining table rather than in our basement, so we kept having to go over there.

So afterwards I came home, changed clothes, and cleaned the inside and outside of my shoes.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t refuse to go over there, period. But Richard had me so enwebbed in his spell–and afraid to tell him my true opinion lest he make me feel like a prissy clean freak and a disgracefully bad-mannered guest–that I put up with it quietly.

When other people stayed with them, I wondered how they could stand the filth. Even Jeff, when we ended the friendship on 7/1/10, said how glad he was to not be going back into that house with that smell and the filth.

And starting in 2010, when it became clear I was not going to have another child, and I no longer needed to hold onto baby things in case Richard’s little ones came over–I began deep-cleaning my own house.

I gave away the baby things, turned the changing table/baby room back into a library, and started cleaning things I never bothered with before.

My son was older, so with no little ones around we could bring down the breakables again, and I had more time to go deep into cupboards, clean behind furniture, and start cleaning more things more often than I did before.

(I even discovered some beautiful wedding-present-dishes and glasses that had been completely forgotten about. They were good for daily use, so I washed them and put them into circulation, replacing our tired old ones.)

This was how I dealt with my grief in the summer of 2010, and it became a yearly summer routine. Now that my son was older and I had more time, I took the toilet job back from my husband, because he didn’t do it the way I liked and had to be reminded all the time.

I now needed sparkly clean toilets, and floors swept every day. My house would be CLEAN! cleaner than it ever had been! because I couldn’t stand even the faint resemblance to the filth I saw in THEIR house! I’m not sure if “traumatized” by their filth is the right term, but it was something like it.

They all lived in my house for six weeks. And while I was forced to constantly deal with the filth they brought into my house, constantly cleaning day and night for weeks, dealing with the mess and bad hygiene and cockroaches and lice and laundry on the floor and allergy medication left in reach of the children and bathroom cleanups every time somebody used it–

Tracy was constantly hostile to me, showering me with insults which should have led to her getting kicked out the door. And she then tried to force me to grovel to her for her forgiveness and approval, because she twisted my treatment of her into something it was not, and her own treatment of me into sweetness and light.

I found myself down the rabbit hole.

Things were so bad that the only reason I can think of for staying friends with them for so long, was Richard’s hold over me. I could not imagine life without him.

Table of Contents

4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

10. Grief

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on July 7, 2010August 2, 2022

I finally find my Frodo–who moves in

As a shy, quiet person, I had the occasional friends in school but not always in my neighborhood, so when classes changed and lunch periods changed and the kids around me changed, my friends changed as well.

Since I was verbally bullied for being different from the other kids (somehow weird), I was glad to have these friends, but I longed to have that one friend who would stick with me through life. Someone to be inseparable (but not lovers) with, like Bill & Ted or Anne & Diana or Frodo & Sam or Ofra Haza & Andrew Eldritch or Gus & Shawn.

I made good friends in college who became friends for life, but after college we moved away from each other–separate cities, separate states. It’s hard to maintain close friendships even when they live an hour away from you, so we’ve relied heavily on e-mail and now Facebook.

I did occasionally see friends who lived about an hour away, and occasionally did things in the SCA while Jeff was more involved in it for a while.

Male or female has never mattered to me. I have two brothers and no sisters, so I was just as comfortable hanging out with boys as with girls. Not the athletic type of boy who thinks burps are funny, no. I mean the smart, geeky ones who watch British TV and play role-playing games.

My husband and I both have had opposite-sex friends, some close, all through our marriage, with no jealousy.

But it had been years since I’d had a close friend who lived right there nearby, when Richard and I became close over the Net and the phone, having met on a forum while I was searching for spiritual truth.

He was impressed by the theological section of my website, and wanted to befriend me. He said his wife wanted to befriend me too, but I rarely heard from her, no e-mails or phone calls, just a web chat one evening.

I was surprised at how easily I could talk to Richard on the phone, and for hours, because with most people I just can’t do that, preferring face-to-face or e-mail/letters even for my closest friends.

Also, I can only talk on and on with people I “click” with. That doesn’t happen with just anyone, either. Jeff, too, found him easy to talk to when I was unable to come to the phone right away.

In those days, Richard called when he said he would, except once–and that time, he apologized and explained later. (This all changed in 2008.) He led me into Orthodoxy, where I found my spiritual home, and that’s mostly what we talked about, as I had lots of questions. He seemed like a cool person. But he lived far away.

I began going to the local Greek Orthodox church in November 2006, though–deliberately taking my time to make such a huge decision–I didn’t join it officially until January 2009.

I did what I could to connect with people there during coffee hour, but had to deal not only with my shyness but with the language barrier: Most of the parishioners spoke English just fine, but many of them spoke and understood very little English. Also, most of them were much older than I was.

One morning during Divine Liturgy, in a fit of loneliness, I prayed that God would please send me a friend. Just a short time later–within a few months, I believe–Richard e-mailed me that he needed a new place to live, and I suggested my hometown. He hadn’t expected that, and was surprised to find how promising my hometown would be.

This was early fall 2007. His wife and children were thousands of miles away with her parents while he cleared out their house, from which they’d been evicted. He had no job, and hated the area. He had no hope and nowhere to go.

He was grateful to me because he actually felt happy now, hopeful. He checked out the links I sent him about my city, then later in person, and loved the town.

He asked to stay with us for a few days while looking for a job; he began calling at least once a day, talking my ear off so much that my ear actually began ringing.

I already felt bonded with him, that we had a close friendship, even though we never met, because he was the only person (besides my priest and Jeff) to whom I told all the details when my family was shaken up during Lent 2007.

It was a disturbing event, full of embarrassing details, things that had been hidden from me by my family for my entire life. He and my priest heard them all, but even my college friends didn’t hear them at first.

But he had never told me certain personal details about himself and his life, which now, in September 2007, he began telling me, things which just started pouring out without me prompting him. I worried a bit about his violent past, and was uncomfortable with some of the things he said, because I felt they should be kept private from most people.

But we’d been on the same forum for about two years, we’d been phone friends for maybe a year or so, Todd (the owner of the forum) had stayed with him twice for a month each time, Richard’s wife was on the same forum, and another poster had been his phone friend for several years and had glowing praises for him, so I figured–hoped–he was safe. And hoped that he would arrive while Jeff was around, which he did. The day he arrived was, I believe, around October 5, 2007.

Despite pouring out my soul to a forum friend online, in person for the first time, he or she seems a complete stranger. So I turn into a turtle, hiding in my shell.

It took me a bit to get used to Richard’s physical presence, to connect the forum guy and the voice on the phone with this hulking stranger in my living room. We had shared so many things already, I had confided things in him, called him when my family went through a terrible upset–but now he was like a stranger.

He was happy to meet me, but after waiting anxiously for him all day long, now I wanted to run away from him. Until one afternoon when we started chatting about music, the conversation began to flow, and then we just looked at each other all of a sudden like, “Whoa!”

Everything began coming together and falling into place. Despite Tracy’s aggressive personality–which he had been telling me about and which I soon began seeing for myself–our families seemed to be blessings and helps for each other over the coming years.

It all seemed to be an answer to prayer, the moving of the Spirit, God’s will for Richard and I to be friends and help each other spiritually and materially.

Richard lived with us for two months, during which time we bonded even more, as I did with two of my college roommates. There’s just something about living with a person, day in day out, and them being there through all the things you deal with from day to day. We told each other everything.

Though it wasn’t supposed to drag on for so long, I didn’t mind. I finally had someone to watch TV with, since Jeff spent most evenings on the computer or watching other things. I was sure we would be friends for life. At long last, I had somebody outside of the family to talk to again.

Richard became my family, more like a twin brother moving in than a stranger. Jeff was not some Neanderthal macho man threatened by this. He, a far more enlightened being than that, usually spent evenings in the basement so Richard and I could talk.

He trusted us both so much that twice he went out of town overnight, once for work and once for a D&D game in the next county on the same day as a blizzard.

And we were careful not to see each other in undress, yelling out warnings when necessary, since we had no spare bedroom and had to stick him on the couch. I wore my robe over my nightgown; I wore a tank top under revealing shirts; I never wear low-waist pants or high-waist shirts.

I considered him my best and closest friend. He was the one I went to about religion. He’s the one I found to help light my way when I was searching for the True Church, the original doctrines. He had already found it before I did.

We had similar backgrounds, and similar views of the various churches. We could sympathize with each other about going through contemporary church services.

We could discuss Orthodox theology with a similar base knowledge and interest. We could discuss the meaning of original sin, or whether River of Fire is a good source of Orthodox doctrine. We could discuss what it means to experience the Holy Spirit.

I could ask him about various things, such as why the English translations of the Latin and Greek versions of the Nicene Creed are so different, even the parts that come from the original Ecumenical Council that produced them.

I could share with him Orthodox writings, and give him Orthodox books and icons for Christmas or birthdays. I could tell him what led me away from Western doctrines, without feeling judged for turning to “heresies.”

I simply don’t have another friend with whom I can discuss all these things, at least not from the same background, baseline knowledge, amount of interest and same denomination.

I asked him about difficult points of Orthodox doctrine or practices. I asked him how to forgive people who had hurt me years before. I lamented to him about Net Orthodoxy and its legalism.

In short, he was my spiritual mentor.

He was the one I always wrote to about interesting church meetings or services. Who else can I write these things to, who has the same level of interest? I wrote to him about my church because he was the one who led me there.

And these things led to sharing our life experiences and troubles. I told him my secrets, and he told me his. He was my counselor, as I poured out my heart to him about various issues I dealt with, how I’d been bullied growing up, and how I’d been used and abused by college exes.

This included private details which I did not normally tell anyone, because of their nature. I told him these things because I trusted him completely.

I told him funny stories of things that happened day-to-day, or dreams. I shared with him thoughts about movies I watched, books I read, life stories. We talked for hours at a time.

Since he lived with us for a time, he became like an adopted brother, so I could tell him things I didn’t tell other people. He became “Uncle Rich” to my son. We could joke back and forth with each other and play off each other so easily that one guy in an IRC chat room said, “I love it when you guys are here!”

We went on religious websites together and defended Orthodoxy. And we had similar tastes in music, both loving the obscure Goth genres, 80s, New Wave–yet knew some of the same Christian artists as well. He had actually been a Goth, while I was interested in Goth culture, and did as much “Gothyness” as I could do in a small city in the Midwest.

Because of our similar backgrounds, we both knew about the Thief in the Night series, Left Behind, and other such things. We were even the same age, so grew up with the same pop culture. We both liked watching EWTN. We were both interested in paranormal investigations.

It seems impossible to replace him. These elements of our friendship I found especially valuable and important, especially appealing, and these were the reasons I was so attached to his friendship.

I was quite certain, from how he acted and what he said every day, that the feeling was mutual, that we both felt bonded to each other in a special, lasting, close friendship. I wanted to be like his sister or cousin, to whom he was also this close.

I had no idea he was love-bombing me, bonding me to him emotionally with so much attention and praise that it became addictive. He must have seen how vulnerable I was, since I so badly needed a friend, so badly wanted that One True Friend.

Even though he lived in my house and I knew his gross and annoying habits, I was so devoted to his friendship that I could overlook this. He had such charisma that I saw the same bond and devotion in Todd and in Richard’s best friend from his hometown. I craved his good opinion, and felt devastated when he criticized me.

It wasn’t about a lover: I already had one. It was about that One True Friend, whom I had always dreamed of, and would think I had found, only one of us had to move away so things drifted off. I felt my life would not be complete without that One True Friend, that Frodo, in addition to my husband and child. I was a ready victim:

Loneliness. If you’re lonely, your unmet social and emotional needs can create an opening for a psychopath to enter your life. Many lonely people are also bored, which elevates risk.
According to Brown, some victims don’t even know they’re lonely, bored, or living a small, confined life, but the psychopath knows. –Psychopaths & Love, Traits of the Psychopath’s Victim

In this part, I explain about Richard’s claim to have hypnotized me. I knew nothing of this until 2009, when he told me he used conversational hypnotism to get me to open up with him while he lived here.

He told me Americans are far too reserved, so he gets upset whenever people say Frodo and Sam are gay lovers. He said it used to be seen as perfectly normal and NOT sexual to hug or hold hands or whatever with friends as well as family members or spouses.

I told him that in the book Two Towers, second in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo and Sam held hands, fell asleep cuddled up with each other, and the like, and that’s why I joked about them being lovers.

But he said the fuss in America over Frodo and Sam’s supposed homosexual relationship was silly, that no one would have dreamed they were homosexuals back when the book was written.

Which is true, but also made me more susceptible to Richard breaking down my own physical reserve. It took me a while just to hug him.

I don’t have a problem with opposite-sex friends innocently flirting: My husband does it, I do it, my geek friends do it, my SCA friends do it, my old co-workers did it. In time I learned that Richard did it, too, with everybody, including male friends! My husband and friends also consider it perfectly natural to get crushes now and then, as long as you don’t act on them.

At first, Richard behaved like a prude about innocent flirting, but then he got freer. One Sunday morning, we visited the brand-new Catholic church building–and he put his head on my shoulder right there in the middle of Mass. He muttered a playful “sorry” and sat back up.

Then he went in the opposite direction of “prude” one night all of a sudden, after Jeff went to bed.

He didn’t put hands in forbidden zones or try to kiss me or profess undying passion, no, nothing like that. But he confused me greatly by putting his head in my lap, then on my shoulder.

I was used to flirting with words, such as the occasional double entendre. Or Richard calling up a female friend right after calling his wife and saying, “Hey, what are you wearing?” He demonstrated it was all meant in fun.

But this–What was this? He had also started giving me long, affectionate hugs good-night.

The alarm bells went off. I wanted a platonic friendship, not an affair; we were getting in too deep! I finally fled to my room to go to bed and get away from this.

Then the next day and night he went about life like nothing happened, talking about his wife and kids coming to town in a couple of days, etc.

Then the following night he did these things again, making me think, What the heck is going on here?

Then the next day he acted normally again. I also felt like the scum of the earth for letting him do these things.

So that night I found a way to bring up the “cuddling and flirting,” to confront him about it, get the truth out of him of what the heck he was up to.

But he said, No, it wasn’t cuddling, cuddling is something else, my family/relatives put our heads on each other’s shoulders, I was sleepy, and the teasing wasn’t flirting, it was “playful banter.”

Now I see him as using me for affection after a long, tumultuous period with his wife, but holding back just enough that he could feign innocence when I called him on it later…when he realized I thought he was making moves on me, told him they were freaking me out.

I see him as manipulating me through his covert hypnotism and the trust he gained with me, doing these things when Jeff was not there, preying on my NVLD gullibility–which has also made me susceptible to elaborate hoaxes played on me by exes. But at the time, I just saw him as a well-meaning bumbler.

But now that I called him out, it was time for him to backtrack: I’m sorry if I violated your boundaries. No, no, I do those things with my sisters-in-law! cousins! sister! They’re gestures of friendship and caring! And those things I said–that was just “playful banter,” not even flirting. No, we did nothing wrong. You can look your husband in the eye. And no, we don’t have to stop doing these things…..

I never would’ve thought of doing these things, with my American and possibly Asperger-ish reserve, if it had not been for Richard mentoring me on how they’re perfectly fine for platonic friends to do.

I was never quite as comfortable with it as he was, but he taught me there was nothing to worry about, and made me feel silly for ever thinking he meant anything more than friendship. Then I began advocating such things myself. I discovered the Cuddle Party website:

One problem with finding comforting touch is that if you believe that touch is about sex, then either you are afraid it might lead to sex, or you are afraid it might not lead to sex. Not so helpful.
We humans need touch and affection. It’s no longer a question. Nurturing, welcome consensual touch is good for you.
Good for your body, heart and spirit. Good for your blood pressure, your nervous system, your emotional health, your ability to connect with and trust people, your ability to respect and care for yourself, your creativity, sense of safety and comfort and belonging.
Infants who are deprived of touch fail to thrive; we never outgrow the need.
Why is it so hard to find? Because for the most part, we think it has to do with sexual relationship, or at least romance, hooking up or ‘attraction’.
What if it just has do with being a human being who cares about other human beings? Kindness, compassion, comfort and nourishment.
Cuddle Party is a movement to reclaim this option in our lives.

I discovered that other cultures and time periods have been freer than our own with nonsexual touch, discovered that I have SCA friends who are just as free with their friends as Richard is with his friends.

We set up some boundaries to stay out of trouble, “forbidden zones” and the like, and agreed that any “playful banter” would be done in platonic friendship only, that any gestures would be in platonic friendship only. I knew that if he ever tried to kiss me, I’d have to end the friendship right there and then. I thought that was that.

Oh, by the way (he said the day his wife moved in with us), don’t do these things when she’s around. She’s very jealous of other women.

Then, of course, when wifey finds out–I don’t know what he told her, but from the way she kept blaming me for everything, I get the impression he didn’t give her the full story, that he was the instigator telling me it was all innocent. So who gets in trouble? Me.

It makes me feel like such a naive, gullible fool, putting my trust in his words more than in his actions, which told me something other than what his words said, but for the sake of friendship I chose to believe him and trust him.

I now realize my own blame here was to not call him out on the discrepancies I noted even then (how one day he called it “flirting” then re-named it to “playful banter” when it was convenient for him). To fail to notice that he didn’t do these things in front of Jeff, that he told me not to do them around Tracy.

But I wanted to believe he was telling me the truth because I didn’t want to be some scumbag cheater. And you just don’t want to accuse your BFF of lying to you.

I wanted a One True Friend, not a lover, did not want to turn my beautiful friendship into a stinky, dirty, filthy affair. I did not want to be barred from the Eucharist through carnal relations with the one who led me to the Eucharist in the first place.

He was not sexually attractive, with his repulsive hygiene (bathing every two or three days) and morbid obesity. But we had a connection of the mind and spirit, a rare jewel of friendship, the Platonic ideal and philia.

Oscar Wilde also discusses this ideal in his Portrait of W.H. (pages 62-67 in this copy, near the end of part II of the full text). He explains that Renaissance thinkers resurrected the Platonic ideal of friendship, and used terms for their bosom friends that made Victorian readers think they were lovers, even though they were not.

The lack of Frodo/Sam-type friendships in modern American society is described here:

Why is The Lord of the Rings such a powerful myth? Why did the final installment earn almost half a billion dollars in its first eighteen days?
Because all of us want the fellowship illustrated in the films. Because we want relationships that last. Because we want to feel super-glued to family and friends, like the glue that bound Sam and Frodo. Because we want involvement. Because we want shared creativity and wonder, because we want loyalty and commitment.
And yet we don’t have this feeling. Oh, if we are lucky we have it in one relationship, maybe a spouse. But in general we don’t have it.
In general we tend to be atoms bouncing around the eternal void, occasionally bumping into another atom, exchanging a curse or a smile.
Ought we not create our own Fellowship of The Ring? Ought we not create relationships that will last a lifetime? Ought we not build delightful things, even at some risk to ourselves? Ought we not discover something with ourselves that demands eternal loyalty and commitment?

I thought Richard was that kind of friend for me.

I wanted to believe we were simply expressing caring for each other as just friends. I didn’t realize his instructions to not do them around Tracy gave them a dirty tinge. I believed him, and saw nothing wrong with giving him the same gestures that I would to my son.

I did not do to him gestures that I only do to my husband, did not do the kinds of cuddling I only do with my husband or son. No, for us “cuddling” meant sleeping on a shoulder, with arms folded only around yourself. Like in a recent viral Internet picture in which a man let a tired stranger sleep on his shoulder on a subway train. Or John sleeping on Jesus’ shoulder during the Last Supper (John 13:23-25).

It was sweet, innocent, a beautiful symbol of platonic friendship, which Americans could do well to adopt, instead of labeling it “gay” or “inappropriate.” We had distinct boundaries in place.

So I thought we were safe and everything would be fine. However, he needed to move out soon, before anything did happen.

But moving in his family was not the answer: No, he finally had a job now, and should have saved up a down payment, then moved out immediately after. You know, like we planned all along.

But then one day, he told me the plans had changed and his family was coming to stay at our little condo. !!!!

You may already have noted that I am much like Anne Shirley. I always identified with her inner life: full of romantic ideals and loyalty, expressive on paper even if (unlike Anne) I am not in speech, willing to tell my friends I love them and how much they mean to me, identifying kindred spirits and longing for a Bosom Friend.

One of my friends, Mike from my college memoirs, believes we should say “I love you” to anyone–friends, co-workers–without fear that it’s somehow “inappropriate.” I also identify with Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

While Tracy was always angry at somebody or something, always ready to fight. Whenever I picture her, her face is twisted in fury as she yells and screams or hits. Tracy does not understand people like me. She is not a kindred spirit.

Here are articles written by people who believe that physical affection between platonic friends is not wrong at all–not even if your friend puts his head in your lap. So no, it’s not wrong to behave this way with a friend, just different from the current culture:

Platonic Love and its Revealing Secrets

Is Flirting Cheating?

Touch Much: Why is Platonic Affection so Taboo?

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4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

10. Grief

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on July 6, 2010June 10, 2022

I was Sam in search of a Frodo, Anne in search of a Diana

Richard said he wanted a friend like Sam was to Frodo on Lord of the Rings, so I told him I would be. Finally I had a close friend in my own city whom I could see often, talk to often, someone who could get my normally quiet self to talk for hours, someone to understand me.

We had deep discussions, not about the weather but about music, religion, life experiences, movies, subcultures such as Goth (which he’d been heavily into while I had been interested in it), cultural attitudes, all sorts of things.

Because of my shyness, introversion and NVLD, and moving far from friends or family, it has been hard for me to make lasting friends in this city. I used to make geek friends through local BBS‘s, but the Internet rose and the BBS’s died. I changed jobs and churches; friends had squabbles and I became collateral damage.

I had always wanted a friend like Frodo/Sam or Anne/Diana or Bill/Ted, that one bosom friend who is closer to you than any other platonic friend, who wants to be with you all the time, but who is NOT your spouse or in any way a sexual partner. Finally, I found that Friend.

But then his wife got jealous of me and within a few years, it all fell apart. I thought Richard cared enough to have my back, since he said I was very dear to him, and showed in various ways that he loved me like a sister.

But in many things, he didn’t seem to want to understand me. He let his wife tease me for being different and bully me for being quiet. He refused to listen when both Jeff and I tried to explain my shy, quiet, introverted personality, that he was too hard on me.

In the moment of testing, he let me down. Majorly. He became my Judas.

So here I am alone again, wondering if I’ll ever have a friend like (I thought) he was again, someone who doesn’t live two or three hours away. It may have to be a socially inept or shy person, like I usually befriend, rather than an outgoing extrovert like Richard, the type who thinks that everyone can be just like him.

I hope it’ll be a woman, so I don’t have to deal with a jealous wife again, but finding a woman who’s into the same music I like, is into Orthodox theology and has grown up in the Fundamentalist/ Evangelical subculture–that could be hard.

No, I don’t want to hear about the evils of opposite-sex friendships, because it’s a bunch of BS. We’re liberated Gen-Xers; trust is a virtue. I treat the topic in greater detail here, along with flirting, displays of affection between friends, and jealousy.

My husband was perfectly fine with our friendship, was glad whenever I got a chance to chat with Richard for more than a few minutes, and Richard had all sorts of female friends, with whom he innocently flirted (guys, too).

People put far too many rules on their friendships and on each other, when they should just let things be.

Tracy was abusive verbally and physically to Richard and their children. I spoke up about it to him and shied away from her aggressive personality.

Instead of realizing she’s far too abusive and aggressive and needs to change herself, she tried to force me to accept her behavior as okay and twist mine into something it wasn’t.

She insisted on approving his friends, that she had veto rights; I know this because they both told me so. She said so in a forum post, calling it “respect” to give up friends your spouse does not want you to have.

While he told me at various times about the rules his friends had to live up to, that she had to meet them, approve them, be friends with them too. He said even his male friends were under this initial scrutiny, subject to her approval.

While he only wanted to meet her male friends before they went off to some political conference together. (He just wanted to know what they looked like so he could beat them up if they tried anything.)

He had to live by far stricter rules than she did, you see.

(12/19/13: Tracy also felt entitled to read Richard’s e-mails and chats, and got mad at him once when she found someone she hated in his cell phone records. Just tonight on Facebook, an old school friend asked,

If you are in a relationship does that mean that you have no privacy? Does that mean that your significant other is entitled to go through your phone, check your text messages and Facebook messages?

The response: a resounding NO! The various responders said you must have trust and privacy, and if your SO does not respect that, you’ve got major problems ahead.

One said if he doesn’t stop this in its tracks, it’s going to get worse; one said “STALKER”; one said he’s going to have female and she’s going to have male friends, so you have to trust each other; another said, Get out, run fast!)

As soon as I learned this, red flags sprang up because of my abusive ex Phil, and all the research on abuse I did while writing about him in 2006. As I explained above, Phil also tried to separate me from my best and dearest friends.

So I already knew about jealousy and control as forms of abuse. I did even more research because of Tracy, and began posting links and comments on jealousy and abuse on this page and this page. (They did not know about these pages.)

During this time, I also read a forum thread in which a woman described her abusive marriage. She said, “He had to approve my friends.”

Instead of becoming the kind of person Richard’s friends would like, Tracy treated them like creeps if they didn’t like her, thereby driving them away as one after another of Richard’s friends ended the friendship, or she forced him to end friendships, showing a huge lack of trust in him and his judgment. There was Todd; there were at least two more whom I know of.

From What Makes Your Control Freak Wife or Girlfriend Tick:

Projection and projective identification play a part in her controlling behaviors. She maps her feelings onto you and controls you by inducing these feelings within you.
Her controlling facade masks her true internal experience. Deep down she feels frightened, out of control, incompetent and helpless.
Les Parrot (The Control Freak) writes, “People who want to exert control over everything can make those around them feel inadequate, insecure, nervous, angry, anxious and physically sick. Their message is: I don’t trust you to be able to do it right; I don’t respect your judgment; I don’t think you are competent; I don’t value your insight.”
Whether or not this woman is aware of it, this is how she feels about herself. Once you recognize the defense mechanisms at play, it becomes a little easier to take her hurtful behaviors less personally. She’d be like this with anyone.

My awkwardness in social situations can lessen around kind people, even if I don’t talk much. But it becomes far worse in the presence of a hostile person, which Tracy is not just to me but to many people.

Instead of doing her best to draw me out and be kind, Tracy just kept punishing me and sending hostile waves at me for being unable to open up to her, which pushed me further into my shell–yet she and Richard both blamed me for it.

This all made my husband furious, especially when Richard finally allowed Tracy to vent her fury on me in such horrible language and words (such as “f— off,” which nobody has ever said to me before) that made me wonder how any Christian woman could justify this treatment of any other person.

Jeff and I told others what she said; they were flabbergasted that anybody would cuss me out like that. Jeff and I finally threw up our hands and tossed her out of our lives for good.

Unfortunately, this meant Richard was tossed out as well, even though–at long last for me, who had been starved of good local friends for years–Richard had been my dearest and closest friend for 5 years.

He had been my spiritual mentor, the one who led me into the Truth I’d been searching for, the one who helped me decide on Orthodoxy and thirst for the Eucharist. He helped me find love for God and my faith once again. He helped open up the Scriptures for me, by leading me in the right direction.

But then he turned on me and betrayed me, threw me under the bus, letting Tracy tear me apart instead of giving her the key piece of information which would have proven to her my innocence.

Then, a month later, he said that not saying two sentences together to Tracy for a month and a half (WHAT month? and I don’t count my sentences! what, ANOTHER rule nobody told me about?) was somehow worse than being verbally abused???

Being wary of someone who’s been bullying you for two years and has recently upped the intensity, is worse than being verbally abused????

And this to a person they already knew to be extremely quiet in most social situations? What kind of people are these two, anyway?

This makes me struggle to keep in the same faith as him and Tracy, and even causes me to doubt the very existence of God (who seemed to place him into my life just as I prayed for a friend, and to cause our families to be there for and bless each other).

After their abuses of me, I also struggle to make social connections with anyone else who isn’t already in my circle of friends (friends I mostly keep in touch with via the Internet). I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I open up to anyone else the way I opened up to Richard, that they’ll hurt me like he did.

The problem first started with Tracy misunderstanding me, and me not having a clue about it until she was already digging in her heels and treating me badly and I had no idea why.

I noted over the years that she responds to problems by snarking at and being mean to the supposed offender, which she never so much as apologizes for. This offends the offender and leads to nothing but arguments and bad feeling.

I complained to Richard about it and then, finally, started hearing what she was so upset about. But trying to clear up the misunderstanding did no good at all because she was apparently determined to think badly of me.

Nobody informed me of a test I had to pass for Tracy to let me be friends with Richard, or what I was expected to do or know, until long after I already failed. And after that, it seemed that no matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough to make up for it.

In fact, it reminds me of Hell Week during my short-lived stint pledging a sorority: having no idea how I’ve offended the actives or what rule I’ve broken until I see a roster that’s already in the hundreds below zero. And each day, more points are taken away, finding my points down in the negative thousands with no idea what rules I broke and no hope of getting back up.

I could concede that some of her rules seemed reasonable enough in normal circumstances–but we were not in normal circumstances, we were sharing a house.

When you live together for weeks on end, when you must keep in the good graces of the host and hostess who are doing you a huge favor that few people would do, getting in a snit fit about things that go against your usual rules, makes no sense.

And it makes no sense to say you don’t “know” somebody when you live in the same crowded house for six weeks, and spend nearly every night socializing with that person for hours.

When we shared a house, both our families for six weeks, it was a disaster. It was never part of the deal.

We lived in a tiny house, about 1100 square feet. The spare room (a library, not a bedroom) was filled with the changing table and baby supplies, so already Richard slept on the couch.

It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, helping out a friend until he found a job and a place to move into with his family, NOT an indefinite address for the entire family.

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