De Profundis

De Profundis: Oscar Wilde on toxic friendship–Part 2

Part 1

Oscar Wilde was very relieved at the thought of losing Bosie out of his life, and soon got rid of his fever and began to feel better.  But then a few days later, on his birthday, he got a letter from Bosie.  He thought maybe it would be the usual “pretty phrase, an expression of affection, a word of sorrow” (typical hoovering) to get him back.  But instead, it was

an elaborate repetition of the two scenes, set cunningly and carefully down in black and white!  You mocked me with common jests. Your one satisfaction in the whole affair was, you said, that you retired to the Grand Hotel, and entered your luncheon to my account before you left for town.

You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving my sickbed, on my sudden flight downstairs [when he felt Bosie was going to harm him]. ‘It was an ugly moment for you,’ you said, ‘uglier than you imagine.’  Ah!  I felt it but too well.

What it had really meant I did not know: whether you had with you the pistol you had bought to try and frighten your father with, and that, thinking it to be unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company:

whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner-knife that by chance was lying on the table between us:

whether, forgetting in your rage your low stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some specially personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there: I could not tell.  I do not know to the present moment.

All I know is that a feeling of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left the room at once, and got away, you would have done, or tried to do, something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong shame.

Only once before in my life had I experienced such a feeling of horror at any human being.  It was when in my library at Tite Street, waving his small hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father, with his bully, or his friend, between us, had stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out.

In the latter case he, of course, was the one who had to leave the room first.  I drove him out.  In your case I went.  It was not the first time I had been obliged to save you from yourself.

Both this letter and the scene itself would qualify as narcissistic rage episodes.

Bosie ended his letter with, “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.  The next time you are ill I will go away at once.”  As Wilde wrote,

For you to write thus to me, when the very illness and fever from which I was suffering I had caught from tending you, was of course revolting in its coarseness and crudity; but for any human being in the whole world to write thus to another would be a sin for which there is no pardon, were there any sin for which there is none.

Then Wilde wrote, “I confess that when I had finished your letter I felt almost polluted, as if by associating with one of such a nature I had soiled and shamed my life irretrievably.”

This is exactly how I felt after receiving the e-mail from Richard and Tracy and copied here.  Whether they both had written it, or just one of them, the e-mail was just as “revolting in its coarseness and crudity” and revealed the same “coarseness of fibre” as Wilde had described Bosie’s letter, and inspired similar revulsion.

But unfortunately, Bosie’s brother was found dead in a ditch, so Wilde decided to put off breaking off relations with him in his grief.

The gods are strange.  It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us.  They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.  But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.

…And but for my pity and affection for Richard’s family in their poverty, I would never have allowed them into my house…and they never would have become so entrenched in my life that they could bully me.  But we can’t become cold and hard in order to keep away such sorrow; that won’t do, either.

For Wilde to have cut off Bosie at such a time would have been cruel.

Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life or on the lives of others.

This is an apt description of Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorders.

Wilde then describes Bosie’s leechlike behaviors, going on about how his devotion to Wilde (to the exclusion of his family) “was a proof of your wonderful appreciation of me, and your great affection,” but attaching himself to someone who provided money and “intellectual attractions.”

Bosie lived it up with Wilde, living off Wilde’s dime, making a show of giving up his allowance from his father rather than giving up Wilde, but not giving up “even one of your most superfluous luxuries, or most unnecessary extravagances.”

In fact, Wilde had been detained at a hotel because of trouble paying expenses incurred when Bosie stayed there with him for 10 days, then–without Wilde’s permission–brought a friend to stay there as well.  Because he was detained, he found the card from Bosie’s father which led to the libel suit which led to his ruin, rather than off in France knowing nothing about the card.

Bosie financially drained not only Wilde, but, to some extent, his mother; “the continued drain…was never so distressing, because…never so completely unaccompanied by the smallest word of thanks, or sense of limit.”  Wilde even ended up going bankrupt, and lost everything.

Wilde chides Bosie for thinking

that in attacking your own father with dreadful letters, abusive telegrams, and insulting postcards you were really fighting your mother’s battles, coming forward as her champion, and avenging the no doubt terrible wrongs and sufferings of her married life.  It was quite an illusion on your part; one of your worst indeed.

The way for you to have avenged your mother’s wrongs on your father, if you considered it part of a son’s duty to do so, was by being a better son to your mother than you had been: by not making her afraid to speak to you on serious things: by not signing bills the payment of which devolved on her: by being gentler to her, and not bringing sorrow into her days….

You were wrong even in fancying that it would have been an absolute delight and joy to your mother if you had managed through me to get your father put into prison…And if you want to know what a woman really feels when her husband, and the father of her children, is in prison dress, in a prison cell, write to my wife and ask her.  She will tell you.

It has been a year and a half since the sentencing, but Wilde’s memories still haunt him, as they do with many of us who have experienced the pain of being connected to a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, but with the added trouble of being in prison.

Because he’s in prison, he doesn’t have those daily tasks or human interactions which keep most of us occupied during our grief; for some of us, our mind is that prison, because even our daily tasks cannot keep our minds from straying to that same topic, our memories and emotions about that person.

He writes that Bosie was once described by a newspaper as following Wilde about like his shadow:

[T]he memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon me till dawn:

at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison-yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall:

there is nothing that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair:

every strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I remember the street or river down which we passed, the wall or woodland that surrounded us, at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the clock, which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the moon.

He acknowledges that Bosie loved him.

But you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an entirely opposite character to mine…In you Hate was always stronger than Love.  Your hatred of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o’erthrew, and overshadowed your love of me….

So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequence.  If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours.  If you won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation, and the advantages of victory.

He describes how hate had blinded Bosie and gnawed at his nature.  Then Bosie’s father sent Wilde a letter “with its obscene threats and coarse violences,” which sounds familiar to those of us who have dealt with the personality disordered.

Wilde sensed danger, said he “would not be the catspaw between you both in your ancient hatred of each other,” that it was not fair to Wilde, and in a familiar sentiment to those of us who have had to deal with drama queens/kings, “that I had something better to do with my life than to have scenes with a man drunken, declasse, and half-witted as he was.”

But Bosie insisted that it had nothing to do with Wilde, that he would not let his father dictate his private friendships, “that it would be most unfair of me to interfere.”  Turns out Bosie had already, before speaking to Wilde, sent his father “a foolish and vulgar telegram, as your answer.  That of course committed you to a foolish and vulgar course of action to follow.”

The telegram would shame “the commonest street-boy.”  It went from “pert telegrams to priggish lawyers’ letters”; this urged on his father “still further,” makes it into a point of honor for his father; so the next attack comes to Wilde publicly instead of in a private letter.

I have to expel him from my house.  He goes from restaurant to restaurant looking for me, in order to insult me before the whole world, and in such a manner that if I retaliated I would be ruined, and if I did not retaliate I would be ruined also.

This order of events is familiar to those who have entered into such wars with the personality disordered.  In fact, it sounds familiar to me, because I have had to expel Richard and Tracy from my life, only to have them stalk my blog looking for something to use against me, and come to my church just so I can see them after I told them I did not want to see or hear from them again.

Rather than end the friendship with Wilde to spare him the wrath of his father, all he

could think of (besides of course writing to him insulting letters and telegrams) was to buy a ridiculous pistol that goes off in the Berkeley, under circumstances that create a worse scandal than ever came to your ears.

Indeed the idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your father and a man of my position seemed to delight you.  It, I suppose very naturally, pleased your vanity, and flattered your self-importance….I never remember you in higher spirits than you were for the rest of that season.

There’s that drama queening!  Bosie then starts sending his father so many “telegrams of such a character” that his father finally tells his servant to stop bringing him telegrams.

(I’ve gotta wonder: Telegrams?  Doesn’t that mean that the telegraph operator has to see the whole thing?  Has Bosie no shame, letting telegraph operators see the telegrams he sends to his father and to Wilde?  Or is this just what he wants?)

So Bosie switched to the open postcard!  They both kept up the war, since Bosie’s father hated him as much as Bosie hated his father.  And poor Wilde is made the scapegoat in the middle of an ancient hatred he never had anything to do with, with Bosie’s father going so far as to attempt to disrupt a performance of one of Wilde’s plays.

The thing that mattered most to Wilde, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon,” Bosie and his father very nearly destroyed as a casualty in their war.

What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you, but Hate blinded you, and you could see nothing.  I could not apologise to your father for his having insulted me and persecuted me in the most loathsome manner for nearly nine months.

I could not get rid of you out of my life.  I had tried it again and again.  I had gone so far as actually leaving England and going abroad in the hope of escaping from you.  It had all been of no use.

You were the only person who could have done anything.  The key of the situation rested entirely with yourself.  It was the one great opportunity you had of making some slight return to me for all the love and affection and kindness and generosity and care I had shown you.  Had you appreciated me even at a tenth of my value as an artist you would have done so.

But Hate blinded you.  The faculty ‘by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations’ was dead in you.  You thought simply of how to get your father into prison.

To see him ‘in the dock,’ as you used to say: that was your one idea.  The phrase became one of the many scies of your daily conversation.  One heard it at every meal.  Well, you had your desire gratified.  Hate granted you every single thing you wished for.  It was an indulgent Master to you.  It is so, indeed, to all who serve it.

For two days you sat on a high seat with the Sheriffs, and feasted your eyes with the spectacle of your father standing in the dock of the Central Criminal Court.  And on the third day I took his place.  What had occurred?  In your hideous game of hate together, you had both thrown dice for my soul, and you happened to have lost.  That was all.

Wilde hoped that when the sentence was given, Bosie would realize what he had done.  But he did not.  “It did not occur to me then that you could have the supreme vice, shallowness.”  He hears nothing of Bosie until, second-hand, he discovers that Bosie wants to publish excerpts of his letters.  Bosie had said his family would pay for their taxed costs, but it comes from Wilde, who is bankrupt.

This part is especially poignant and familiar, even though Wilde’s reason is being imprisoned, where pain and sorrow fill everything:

All this took place in the early part of November of the year before last.  A great river of life flows between you and a date so distant.  Hardly, if at all, can you see across so wide a waste, but to me it seems to have occurred, I will not say yesterday, but today.

Suffering is one long moment.  We cannot divide it by seasons.  We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return….

The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.  Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing to you, and in this manner writing.

Wilde’s mother dies; various people, even ones he doesn’t know personally, send their condolences; Bosie sends not a word.

Wilde complains to Bosie’s brother about Bosie, in a letter meant to prohibit a dedication which is offensive to Wilde, and asks that the words about Bosie be copied and sent to him.

Bosie is upset, he gets his mother upset about it as well, and they spread the news far and wide of just how horrible the words are, yet Bosie never actually writes to Wilde himself about them.

Wilde complains that Bosie has feet of clay, that now it’s impossible to feel anything for him (or himself) but contempt and scorn.

And setting aside all other reasons, your indifference, your worldly wisdom, your callousness, your prudence, whatever you may choose to call it, has been made doubly bitter to me by the peculiar circumstances that either accompanied or followed my fall.

The following is especially familiar:

And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you.  I must do so.  I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine.

For my own sake I must forgive you.  One cannot always keep an adder in one’s breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one’s soul.  It will not be difficult at all for me to do so, if you help me a little….

And I shall really have no difficulty in forgiving you.  But to make it a pleasure for me you must feel that you want it.  When you really want it you will find it waiting for you.

In a very familiar feeling, in the beginning of his imprisonment, Wilde wanted to die.  Then he was filled with rage, and decided to commit suicide the same day of his eventual release.

Then he decided he wanted to live, but to always be sad and make his friends sad as well.  Then he decided that would be unfair to his friends, so he must try to be happy for them.  Finally, he decided he had so much to do that it would be a tragedy to die before he finished.

He remembers the people who laughed at him in the pillory.  In a side-dig at Bosie, who once told Wilde that Wilde was not interesting when not on his pedestal, he writes,

But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals.  A pedestal may be a very unreal thing.  A pillory is a terrific reality.  They should have known also how to interpret sorrow better.

I have said that behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow.  It were still wiser to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.  And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing.  Unbeautiful are their lives who do it.  In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?

It seems that mutual abuse was frequent between Bosie and his father.  Wilde writes of a time in 1893 when Bosie’s father sent Bosie a “very vulgar, violent and abusive letter,” but Bosie’s reply

was in every way worse, and of course far less excusable, and consequently you were extremely proud of it.  I remember quite well your saying to me with your most conceited air that you could beat your father ‘at his own trade.’  Quite true.  But what a trade!  What a competition!

You used to laugh and sneer at your father for retiring from your cousin’s house where he was living in order to write filthy letters to him from a neighbouring hotel.

You used to do just the same to me.  You constantly lunched with me at some public restaurant, sulked or made a scene during luncheon, and then retired to White’s Club and wrote me a letter of the very foulest character. 

The only difference between you and your father was that after you had dispatched your letter to me by special messenger, you would arrive yourself at my rooms some hours later, not to apologise, but to know if I had ordered dinner at the Savoy, and if not, why not.  Sometimes you would actually arrive before the offensive letter had been read.

On one such occasion, Bosie got Wilde to invite a couple of Bosie’s friends, one of whom Wilde had never met before, to a “specially luxurious luncheon,” then instead of showing up, sent an abusive letter to Wilde, timed to reach him half an hour after he was supposed to have arrived.  Rather than read it, Wilde stuck it in his pocket, lied to his guests that Bosie was ill, then read the letter later that evening.

As I was in the middle of its mire, wondering with infinite sadness how you could write letters that were really like the froth and foam on the lips of an epileptic, my servant came in to tell me that you were in the hall and were very anxious to see me for five minutes.

Sure, Bosie is in trouble because a solicitor is looking for him, and now he comes to Wilde for help after having manipulated and narcissistic-raged at him!  Neither of them mentioned the letter, and Wilde was too easily forgiving.

When Bosie’s father’s letters were read in court, he “naturally felt ashamed and pretended to weep.”  But Bosie’s own letters, if read in court, would have inspired “still more horror and repugnance…by everyone.”

But he beat his father’s own trade not just in style, but “in mode of attack you distanced him completely,” using public telegrams and open postcards.  And while Wilde was in prison, Bosie began doing the same to Wilde’s friends as well!

Bosie’s mother made things difficult for Wilde as well.  Instead of confronting her own son directly, she kept writing to Wilde, asking him to do it, because “I am afraid to: he gets so angry when he is spoken to.”  Then she’d write, “On no account let Alfred know that I have written to you.”

He thought for sure she could’ve done something to stop the escalation between Wilde and Bosie’s father by taking “some serious steps,” but instead she sent a friend to suggest that Wilde “gradually drop” Bosie.

As if it had been possible for me to gradually drop you!  I had tried to end our friendship in every possible way, going so far as actually to leave England and give a false address abroad in the hopes of breaking at one blow a bond that had become irksome, hateful, and ruinous to me.  Do you think that I could have ‘gradually dropped’ you?

Do you think that would have satisfied your father?  You know it would not.  What your father wanted, indeed, was not the cessation of our friendship, but a public scandal.  That is what he was striving for.  His name had not been in the papers for years….

For what he was aiming at was popularity, and to pose as a champion of purity, as it is termed, is, in the present condition of the British public, the surest mode of becoming for the nonce a heroic figure.

Near the end, he writes,

I have now written, at great length, to you in order that you should realise what you were to me before my imprisonment, during those three years’ fatal friendship: what you have been to me during my imprisonment, already within two moons of its completion almost: and what I hope to be to myself and to others when my imprisonment is over.

I cannot reconstruct my letter, or rewrite it.  You must take it as it stands, blotted in many places with tears, in some with the signs of passion or pain, and make it out as best you can, blots, corrections and all….

I will admit that it is a severe letter.  I have not spared you.  Indeed you may say that, after admitting that to weigh you against the smallest of my sorrows, the meanest of my losses, would be really unfair to you, I have actually done so, and made scruple by scruple the most careful assay of your nature.  That is true.  But you must remember that you put yourself into the scales.

More information on this letter is here.  Wilde spent three months, near the end of his imprisonment, writing this 50,000-word letter.  He had a friend copy it.  As written in the link here referenced,

In 1913, the entire letter was read to the court after Douglas sued Arthur Ransome for libel, and parts published in the London Press. Douglas testified that he had received the letter from Ross, but after reading Ross’s cover note threw it in the fire unread.

He later claimed that he had never received the package at all. Observers reported that Douglas could not bear it when he learned that the letter was addressed to him and heard its full contents.

From Wikipedia:

Although Douglas had been the cause of his misfortunes, he and Wilde were reunited in August 1897 at Rouen. This meeting was disapproved of by the friends and families of both men.

Constance Wilde was already refusing to meet Wilde or allow him to see their sons, though she kept him supplied with money. During the latter part of 1897, Wilde and Douglas lived together near Naples for a few months until they were separated by their respective families under the threat of a cutting-off of funds.

 

De Profundis: Oscar Wilde on toxic friendship–Part 1

(Here is another blog about this work, which also gives some background.)

I’m currently reading Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written by him in prison to his “friend” Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”).

So far, it’s complaining about the volatile relationship they had, a combination of intimate friendship and lover, and a violent temper which ran in Douglas’ family.  The more I read, the more it sounds like borderline personality or some other mood/personality disorder:

Douglas was a leech, a stalker, and a writer of telegrams and letters full of foul accusations whenever Wilde tried to stick up for himself and end the friendship.  Wilde recognized that it was toxic, but kept taking him back, again and again and again.

He kept giving in to Douglas, hoping that he would calm down, only to find that he became even worse over time.  The rages of this Douglas sound so much like Tracy that I really feel for Wilde.

The text you often find for this work is abridged for general audiences, cutting out the personal letter to Bosie, since it’s a massive work and much of it is about general subjects such as suffering, humility, art, things which Wilde wanted the public to read.

But my copy, part of Complete Works of Oscar Wilde published by Collins (HarperCollins) Publishers, is the entire work, 80 pages.  Here I will focus on the private letter and how it deals with toxic friendship and Cluster Bs (often-used colloquial term for people with narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, anti-social, high-conflict personality disorders), and how similar it sounds to my own experiences with Tracy.

On page 984, we read,

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my will power became absolutely subject to yours. It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true.

Those incessant scenes that seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to:

that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters:

your entire lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage:

all these things in reference to which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so produced in court by your father’s counsel, contained an entreaty not devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos either in its elements or its expression — these, I say, were the origin and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands.

You wore me out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being “the only tyranny that lasts.”

This certainly sounds like some form of Cluster B personality disorder, especially because it is “inherited.”  Borderline and narcissistic personality disorders can run in families, though it’s unclear if it’s from genetics, or from a psychological response to living with a Cluster B.  The following sounds very much like Tracy:

And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre.  In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up.  There was no other alternative.

Through deep if misplaced affection for you: through great pity for your defects of temper and temperament: through my own proverbial good-nature and Celtic laziness: through an artistic aversion to coarse scenes and ugly words: through that incapacity to bear resentment of any kind which at that time characterised me:

through my dislike of seeing life made bitter and uncomely by what to me, with my eyes really fixed on other things, seemed to be mere trifles too petty for more than a moment’s thought or interest–through these reasons, simple as they may sound, I gave up to you always.

As a natural result, your claims, your efforts at domination, your exactions grew more and more unreasonable.

Your meanest motive, your lowest appetite, your most common passion, became to you laws by which the lives of others were to be guided always, and to which, if necessary, they were to be without scruple sacrificed.

Knowing that by making a scene you could always have your way, it was but natural that you should proceed, almost unconsciously I have no doubt, to every excess of vulgar violence….

At the one supremely and tragically critical moment of all my life, just before my lamentable step of beginning my absurd action [suing Bosie’s father for libel], on the one side there was your father attacking me with hideous cards left at my club, on the other side there was you attacking me with no less loathsome letters….

My habit — due to indifference chiefly at first — of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature….I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not Failure merely but Ruin.

Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically.  The warrant once granted, your will of course directed everything.

Wilde writes that, when Bosie talked him into going to trial against Bosie’s father instead of going abroad as his true friends advised, “Of course I should have got rid of you, I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him.”

This is what I did to Tracy when she raged at me, but unfortunately, Wilde did not do this to Bosie.  Part of the trouble was that Wilde kept trying to shake him off, sometimes even going to the trouble of fleeing the country and leaving a fake address with a servant so Bosie would not follow him:

As far as I can make out I ended my friendship with you every three months regularly, and each time that I did so you managed by means of entreaties, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your friends, the interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back.

Sounds like Wilde was subjected to “hoovering,” the common term for a Cluster B’s attempts to get back the person who has escaped.  And Wilde kept taking him back and forgiving him.  It must be maddening to go through this every three months with the same person.

Wilde also was subject to “false nostalgia,” when the victim of a Cluster B begins thinking things couldn’t possibly be as bad as he thinks they are, that he must be imagining it:

On my return to London the next day I remember sitting in my room and sadly and seriously trying to make up my mind whether or not you really were what you seemed to me to be, so full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to yourself and to others, so fatal a one to know even or to be with. 

For a whole week I thought about it, and wondered if after all I was not unjust and mistaken in my estimate of you.

At the end of the week a letter from your mother is handed in.  It expressed to the full every feeling I myself had about you….

She saw, of course, that heredity had burdened you with a terrible legacy, and frankly admitted it, admitted it with terror: he is ‘the one of my children who has inherited the fatal Douglas temperament,’ she wrote of you.

I know the feeling, because I, myself, was subjected to these same feelings many times, during my ill-fated friendship with Richard and Tracy, during the several times I considered breaking off the friendship before I actually did, and even after Jeff and I broke things off with them finally.

Even after I wrote everything down, I still would get these feelings–then look back over what I had written, in my blogs/accounts and to friends, and see that everything I wrote was true.

And since it was all true, and since there was so much crap in there that they did, and since my friends were reading what I wrote and saying these people were not worth the pain I was going through, and how horrible they were–I had to force myself to realize that I was not making it up.

Just as Wilde did, I had to get confirmation from others that I was not “unjust and mistaken.”  Not only did my husband Jeff agree with me about the things that had gone on, but I would e-mail Todd about the situation and find that he had the same impressions I did about many things.

I wrote out the things I had witnessed Richard and Tracy doing, and what Richard had told me was going on when I wasn’t around, sent it to a friend who does social work–and she said they both sound very abusive so please report them to CPS.

From what I’ve read on the Shrink4Men website, false nostalgia seems to be common among victims of Cluster Bs, probably because it’s so hard to believe that someone you love could really be so horrible to you, and because of the gaslighting they often do to their victims.  For example:

The I’ve Never Been Happier Hoover: This Hoover is basically a form of reverse psychology in which the abuser assumes, rightly or wrongly, that your abandonment fears are equal to or greater than her own.

I haven’t been this happy in years since you left. You always brought out the worst in me. I never behaved that way with anyone else. I started dating again and am being treated the way I always wanted to be treated. You have no idea how to treat a woman.

The purpose of this Hoover is to get you to begin to doubt your experiences, feelings and memories of her and the relationship. This kind of Hoover can lead you to wonder,

“What if I’d said or done x instead of y? Maybe it really is me? Maybe I should give her another chance? What if she really is wonderful with the new guy? Why wasn’t she that way than me? I wonder if she’ll take me back if I promise to try harder to make her happy?” –Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, Hoovers: Don’t Let the Crazy Suck You Back In

Wilde tried to let go of his friendship with Bosie, at Bosie’s mother’s urging.  But Bosie kept “writing to me by every post from Egypt.”  Wilde read them, then tore them up.  Bosie even telegraphed Wilde’s wife to beg her to get Wilde to write him back!

Our friendship had always been a source of distress to her: not merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better: still, just as she had always been most gracious and hospitable to you, so she could not bear the idea of my being in any way unkind–for so it seemed to her–to any of my friends.

She thought, knew indeed, that it was a thing alien to my character.  At her request I did communicate with you.

The result is especially noteworthy:

I remember the wording of my telegram quite well.  I said that time healed every wound but that for many months to come I would neither write to you nor see you.

You started without delay for Paris, sending me passionate telegrams on the road to beg me to see you once, at any rate.  I declined.  You arrived in Paris late on a Saturday night, and found a brief letter from me waiting for you at your hotel stating that I would not see you.

Next morning I received in Tite Street a telegram of some ten or eleven pages in length from you.  You stated in it that no matter what you had done to me you could not believe that I would absolutely decline to see you:

you reminded me that for the sake of seeing me even for one hour you had travelled six days and nights across Europe without stopping once on the way: you made what I must admit was a most pathetic appeal, and ended with what seemed to me a threat of suicide, and one not thinly veiled.

You had yourself often told me how many of your race there had been who had stained their hands in their own blood; your uncle certainly, your grandfather possibly; many others in the mad, bad line from which you come.

Pity, my old affection for you, regard for your mother to whom your death under such dreadful circumstances would have been a  blow almost too great for her to bear, the horror of the idea that so young a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had still promise of beauty in it, should come to so revolting an end, mere humanity itself–all these, if excuses be necessary, must serve as my excuse for consenting to accord you one last interview.

When I arrived in Paris, your tears, breaking out again and again all through the evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat, at dinner first at Voisin’s, at supper at Paillard’s afterwards:

the unfeigned joy you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though you were a gentle and penitent child: your contrition, so simple and sincere, at the moment: made me consent to renew our friendship.

Two days after we had returned to London, your father saw you having luncheon with me at the Cafe Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine, and that afternoon, through a letter addressed to you, began his first attack on me.

As written here, this is

The Psycho Hoover: The Psycho Hoover is the FOG Hoover on steroids. It includes threats of suicide and/or violence. Basically, the abuser is just escalating their guilt and/or intimidation tactics to keep you in the relationship.

…The Deluxe Hoover: This is the Hoover in which she morphs from abuser to super sweet, sexed up, Stepford wife. In reality, it’s nothing more than a return to the honeymoon and or love bombing stage of the relationship.

In other words, she turns on the charm or whatever it was about her that attracted you to her in the first place. It can have the effect of resurrecting your hopes that the woman you fell in love with is real and that maybe, just maybe, you can go back to the way things were “before.”

I promise things will get better. I love you SO much. We were great together at first. We can get that back! Please just give us another chance! Remember the good times (or time)? Don’t you want to have that again? We’ll both go to therapy. We’ll make it work.

More often than not, the abuse behaviors resurface once you return.

In other words, you broke up with this person because they’re nasty/crazy/whatever, but they do whatever they can to get you back and make you think things will be better this time.

But it’s all an act, because as soon as they’ve got you back, the old behaviors resurface.  Yet more ways that Bosie’s family curse seems to be a Cluster B personality disorder.

Wilde then describes a time when first Bosie, then Wilde came down with a nasty flu.  They were away from home at the time, so had to depend on each other.  Wilde took care of Bosie very well, while when he got better and then Wilde got it, Bosie just kept disappearing to go have fun, leaving Wilde without anyone to care for him.

Bosie, of course, being a leech, is doing this on Wilde’s dime.  Wilde tries to get him to stick around, but Bosie never comes around except for money.  One night at 3am, Wilde goes to the sitting-room in desperate need of water, and finds Bosie:

You fell on me with every hideous word an intemperate mood, an undisciplined and untutored nature could suggest.  By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your remorse into rage.

You accused me of selfishness in expecting you to be with me when I was ill; of standing between you and your amusements; of trying to deprive you of your pleasures.

You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again to where you hoped new pleasures were waiting for you, but that by leaving for you a letter in which I had reminded you that you had neglected me the whole day and the whole evening, I had really robbed you of your desire for more enjoyments, and diminished your actual capacity for fresh delights.

Wilde left in disgust, went back to bed, but lay awake for some time, full of thirst.  At 11:00 Bosie came in.  Wilde thought Bosie was going to make excuses and ask for forgiveness like usual, the forgiveness

that you knew in your heart was invariably waiting for you, no matter what you did; your absolute trust that I would always forgive you being the thing in you that I always really liked the best, perhaps the best thing in you to like.  So far from doing that, you began to repeat the same scene with renewed emphasis and more violent assertion.

I told you at length to leave the room: you pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you moved suddenly towards me.

A sense of horror came over me, for what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two flights of stairs to the sitting-room, which I did not leave till the owner of the lodgings–whom I had rung for–had assured me that you had left my bedroom, and promised to remain within call, in case of necessity.

An hour passes, during which the doctor comes by, finding him “in a state of absolute nervous prostration,” and worse fever than he had been before.  Then Bosie comes back, grabs some money from the dressing-table and mantelpiece, takes his luggage, and leaves.

Actually, this also reminds me of Richard, in the final weeks when I tried to confront him over things he had done that were mean, and his reaction each time was to blow up at me.

And it reminds me of my abusive ex Phil, who–along with his brother and his girlfriend–accused me of being a “party pooper” who didn’t want Phil to have any fun–because I had a concussion.  Because I did not want to go dancing with a concussion.  Because I wanted Phil to care for me instead of dancing while I had a concussion.

Bosie’s narcissistic/borderline rage episode produced the same effect on Wilde which Tracy’s rage episode had on me:

Is it necessary for me to state that I saw clearly that it would be a dishonour to myself to continue even an acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be? 

That I recognised that the ultimate moment had come, and recognised it as being really a great relief?

This is an 80-page work with lots of ground to cover, so I will break this off now and continue it later.

Part 2

Confronting Your Bully/Abuser

I have confronted abusers in my life before.  I confronted Peter via letters; I confronted Shawn in person and via letters; I confronted Phil in person and via letters (this is in my College Memoirs).  Because this was done, I was able to move on eventually, knowing that it had been done.

While revising the public version of my College Memoirs, I read the letters I had sent to Phil, and discovered that they already confronted him with how he abused me, even though at the time I only termed it “borderline abuse.”  I was greatly relieved to discover this, even though at the time he got angry at what I wrote.

When going back over the pages I had written as Richard and Tracy were reading them–many of which I hadn’t even looked at for quite some time, because there were so many–I felt horrified at times to realize what had been left in.  I do feel shame and sorrow for those things, and thought I had deleted them, wish I had deleted them, kept them in the private accounts where such venting belongs.

But as a whole, confronting the abuser was something I had wanted to do for a long time.  And I have gotten tired of being the only one apologizing for hurt feelings or going too far all the time, with no such consideration from Tracy; it’s her turn now.

There were many things in there–most of the things–which I was glad they had read, because they would see how badly they had mistreated me–or so I had hoped.

I explained many things which I had not had the chance to explain before, showed how I had been manipulated by Richard, showed how their bullying and abuse had affected me, showed this guy who wanted to be a priest how his actions had spiritually devastated me.

I thought it impossible for my words to not move anyone.  I thought for sure this would move them.

But alas, it did not.  Instead, they followed the abuser’s modus operandi, and called me crazy, even continued to insist they did nothing wrong and would not apologize, even though I specifically told them not to contact me with more justification or minimizing of what they did.

As Jeff has put it, Tracy needs to get down on her knees and apologize to me.  Otherwise, she has no business having any part of my life, and needs to stay the *@<# away from me.

I see now that they lack so much in empathy that they are focusing not on how their actions have caused me psychological and spiritual trauma and damage–

how for months I wanted to die because of Tracy’s verbal abuse and the loss and betrayal of my supposed best friend–

and how sorely they misjudged and abused me–

and on how this whole thing has left me still in the throes of doubt of the very existence of God, how hard it has been to stay in the Orthodox faith when it holds so many reminders of Richard–

but they are focusing on those things I should have left out, and on their reputation–

which has suffered nothing from a few minor blogs that most, or probably all, people they know will never even see.

In fact, their determination to destroy me could do far worse damage to their reputation, as they bring attention to the blogs and wreak their vengeance on me, when I had no intentions whatsoever of speaking about this openly in my own community.

I recall how even in the midst of Tracy’s narcissistic rages against me, I still tried to come up with things to apologize for, to calm her down, throw her a bone, soothe her hurt feelings so she would stop hurting mine and we could have a true, adult dialogue.

But I never have seen the same courtesy from her, after all the times she’s snarked at me, hurt me, yelled at me, cussed at me, judged and sentenced me without knowing all the details.

Those details she needed to know, they were in my blogs and accounts, and they vindicated me, yet she still insists she did nothing wrong.  The lack of empathy is astounding, and something we have always had to deal with with these people.

What’s even worse is discovering they also desire to transgress legal boundaries by forcing their contact on me when I had said to leave me alone.  Now they’ve crossed from abuse into creepiness, have become stalkers.

This season of The Big Bang Theory had an episode about this very subject (“Bully for Leonard”): Leonard’s old school bully wants a favor from him, but seems clueless about how he once treated Leonard.  So Leonard makes a list of all the things this bully did, and gives it to him.

At first, we think that repentance has occurred, as the bully comes in a drunken, tearful stupor to Leonard, apologizing for everything.  But then he crashes on the couch, wakes up sober the next morning, forgets his sorrow, and becomes the bully all over again, calling Leonard a “pansy” for being upset about the bullying.  (Summary here.)

Confronting your bully/abuser is sort of a mixed bag.  In googling this on occasion, I find stories of people who confronted their abusers and good actually came of it.  I have also had former bullies, apologize to me and become friends.

Several years ago, when reviewing my College Memoirs for online publication, I found things to apologize to Phil for, and sent him a message on an alumni website; he turned around and apologized to me!

Peter and I e-mail on occasion and he’s on my Facebook friends list; Shawn and I exchanged e-mails about 8 or 9 years ago about what was going on in our lives.

There are abusers who have decided to stop abusing, and have truly repented and changed their behavior.

But unfortunately, it seems far more common for confronted abusers to give the abused yet another abusive episode to process and get through.  In fact, while many people are counseled to confront their abusers as a way to finally heal, many are counseled not to because it can be dangerous.  An article on this subject is here.  Some quotes:

Directly confronting your abuser and/or those who knew of the abuse but did not try to help you is not for every survivor, but it can be a dramatic, cleansing tool.  If you feel you need to confront your abuser, do it, before the person dies and you never have the chance again; don’t let that desire haunt you forever.

(My reasons to confront, as quoted from the article:)

 Reasons to confront:
1) Validation of memories
2) Make those you confront feel the impact of what was done to you

Keep in mind:
1) Abusers don’t like to feel out of control and don’t like to be confronted.
2) Your abuser will probably not admit to the abuse or even think what s/he did was abuse.
3) It’s a good idea to bring a friend for support or have someone to meet up with afterwards.
4) It’s okay to change your mind about the confrontation; don’t feel obligated to follow through if you change your mind or have doubts about the outcome.

Remember that the purpose is to speak up for yourself, say what you want to say and ask for what you want, whether you will receive it or not, and know that you took charge of the situation. This will completely flip the situation around from what it was during the abuse; confronting is very powerful.

Here is a forum thread started by someone who confronted her abuser, but he denied the abuse and bullied her more.  Still, she was congratulated for having confronted him. [Update 6/2/17: The link no longer goes to the thread directly, and I don’t know when it was posted, so combing through the old threads is too time-consuming.  But you can search for threads on the same topic.]

Here is a blog post from “faithallen” about confronting the abuser.  Some quotes:

When you work through the healing process from child abuse, you will reach a place in which you must decide whether or not to confront your abuser. There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Some people find it to be very empowering to confront their abuser. Others wind up regretting this decision….

However, you might want to confront your abuser. Many people find confronting their abuser to be incredibly empowering. They are able to look their abuser in the eye and say all of the things that went unsaid throughout childhood. In some cases, they might even receive a sincere apology. (I would not hold my breath for this outcome.)…

Many abusers are unwilling or unable to take responsibility for their actions. Your abuser might tell you that it was all your fault and not show a bit of remorse….

Also, if you choose to confront your abuser, be prepared for the fallout.

In my case, confrontation, while desired, was not sought by me, because I feared it would just bring down more wrath.  It was, apparently, sought by my abusers, who read my blogs about them, without me ever telling them or any of their friends that these blogs existed or who they were about.  So I was forced into a confrontation.

It was exhilarating to finally stand up to them.  And, of course, there has been ugly fallout.  But if they didn’t want to read these things about themselves, if they did not want me to stand up to them and tell them off, then they should not have poked around in my blogs.

I am currently reading Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, and hope to write a post about it after I finish.  He wrote it in prison to his former friend/lover Bosie, whose manipulations led him to file the libel lawsuit, which eventually led to Wilde himself being imprisoned.  It was his means of confronting this person who not only helped ruin his life, but had also been subject to constant rages.

This was a problem with the men of Bosie’s family, showing that it was probably borderline or some other personality disorder, being passed on (whether genetically or behaviorally) from one generation to another.  The original of this massive work was sent to Bosie, but rather than read and reflect, he reportedly read three pages, and tossed the rest into the river.

Here is an article about abusers minimizing the abuse when you call them on it.  Some quotes:

Not all abusers are dysfunctional. Many of them are pillars of society. Abusers come in all shapes and sizes: successful professionals, or peripatetic con-artists, affluent or poor, young or old, well-educated or dropouts. There is no profile of the “typical abuser”.

Yet, abusive behavior often indicates serious underlying psychopathologies, such as personality disorders (Narcissistic, Borderline, Paranoid, or Antisocial are the most common among abusers). Abuse is often associated with alcoholism, drug-use, and other reckless, addictive, or compulsive behaviors.

Denying the Abuse:

Abusers deny the abuse or rationalize it. They tend to shift blame or avoid the topic altogether.

Types of Denial

1.Total outright denial

“It never happened, or it was not abuse, you are just imagining it, or you want to hurt my (the abuser’s) feelings”

2. Alloplastic defense

“It was your fault, you, or your behavior, or the circumstances, provoked me into such behavior”

3. Altruistic defense

“I did it for you, in your best interests”

4. Transformative defense

“What I did to you was not abuse – it was common and accepted behavior (at the time, or in the context of the prevailing culture or in accordance with social norms), it was not meant as abuse”

Abusers are concerned with their reputation and image in the community – neighbors, colleagues, co-workers, bosses, friends, extended family.

Forms of denial in public

5. Family honor stricture

“We don’t do dirty laundry publicly, the family’s honor and repute must be preserved, what will the neighbors say?”

6. Family functioning stricture

“If you snitch and inform the authorities, they will take me (the abusive parent) away and the whole family will disintegrate”

Here is a post from Narcissists Suck about forgiveness.  And a quote that reminds me of Richard in general, and in the latest dealing with Tracy:

There is no human alive who doesn’t fashion some code of conduct that convinces themselves they are “righteous”…i.e. that they are “moral”. Some fashion their moral code according to an objective source, such as the Bible. Others just make one up as they go along and construct their code according to their subjective and perverted feelings and ideas.

My dad lives by the moral code of the mobster. No matter how angry he may get at my mother, no matter how loudly he may condemn some behavior of hers to her face, no matter the long emotional estrangements from her….let some “outsider” (everyone is an outsider to those two including their children) come along and dare to contradict or attempt to hold his wife to accountability in whatever form and his mobster code of conduct is immediately visible.

No one else is ever allowed to “dis” his wife. You make her unhappy and HE is unhappy. You will be yanked on as hard as possible by him in order to bring you back into line and make his wifey happy again.

I see this dynamic as yet another iteration of his dedication to his principle of selfishness. If the wife is unhappy….she makes him miserable, too, because she cries, she rages, she whines, she mopes, she sinks into depression, she tortures him with her misery. He sees the only “moral” thing to do is to make her happy again whatever the human cost may be to the “outsider”.

No one else matters. There is no claim for redress, accountability, or justice that he will admit to be valid. The mobster code of “la familia” applies only to the two of them. The rest of us can rot in hell. –Anna Valerious, Dad, mom’s evil henchman

This post is also relevant, since Narcissists Suck is a very popular blog which also exposes the deeds of narcissists in the author’s life, but she’s kept it up for 6 years:

Before I close this post I will respond to a question posed in the comments to me from “Poe”.

But I have one question. I have read all your posts and there is one thing I can’t understand. Your sister is not stupid. Doesn’t she know that you have this blog? That her emails will be publicly exposed and scrutinized?

She isn’t stupid, but she also isn’t terribly smart. The thought has not even crossed her mind that I have a blog let alone a blog where I have talked about her at length. That thought would require her to think bigger than herself. She isn’t very good at that as you might have noticed.

Since the earliest days of my blogging I have kept an eye out for her through Sitemeter and Statcounter. I know beyond all shadow of doubt that she has not found my blog.

Keep in mind, too, that she is proud of her letters. She thinks she is right and has expressed herself in a way that no one can see her game or object to her words.

She does not possess the ability to know how she is perceived by me. She can’t get out of herself enough to get it. She sorta seems to get it in her latest email, but it is too little too late.

Anyway, it hasn’t occurred to her and I doubt it ever will. Writing under a pseudonym makes the chances of her finding what I’ve written vanishingly small.

As I’ve said before, I don’t care if she finds what I’ve said here about her. I don’t care if she finds herself publicly exposed and scrutinized. She deserves whatever she gets if she should find me here. In any case, she still has her anonymity. She isn’t “publicly exposed” in the truest sense.

In the comments of another post:

When I saw you in my stats I wondered for just a moment if my sister had found my blog. I keep an eye out for her. The day she finds my descriptions of her here is going to be a very interesting day indeed.

Since she stopped blogging a few years ago but still has the blog up, I do wonder if her sister has ever found it.

A blog post about the Psycho Ex-Wife blog being shut down, by another blogger writing about her experiences.  And here’s a blog by someone else who also wrote about her experiences, only to be found by her family.  [Update 5/27/14: One Angry Daughter’s blog no longer exists.]  As One Angry Daughter wrote in “Bear With Me,”

 In case you haven’t already heard the exciting news, my FOO [Family of Origin] has discovered my blog. I really don’t care if they are reading or not.

What I do have a problem with is NM [narcissistic mother] leaving comments spreading FOG [fear, obligation, guilt]. Out of the 300 + comments I have gotten on this blog, her comment was easy to spot. The comment has been deleted.

She has yelled over me and put me in my “place” my whole life. Well, she doesn’t get a voice here.

I have been able to block them from accessing (A how-to guide is in the works). I know eventually they might find a way around it (as I type, they are continuing to try to reload my page, click on various links to this page, and view cached versions of this site — I’m sure they think they are very clever).

I kinda feel like a kid whose mother just read her diary… but I am not ashamed. These pages are my point of view, my honest account, my journey. The only reason I blog anonymously is to protect their identity, not mine.

So FOO – if you have sneaked your way back in and want to read, fine by me. Be warned, you may not like everything I have to say. If it bothers you, by all means, do not come back again. Please keep your opinion to yourself. I will find you and I will block you again.

This video [link no longer works] on narcissistic rage sounds very familiar.  It’s the “how dare you disagree with me” which showed up very clearly on 7/1/10 when Jeff confronted Richard, and a month ago when Richard and Tracy found my blog.  [Update 3/23/15: I don’t know what video this originally linked to, but you can easily find such videos on Youtube.]

Another post on this subject: Reblog: What Happens When You Send Your N the Letter

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