Fighting the Darkness: Richard and Tracy Story

Tracy Sighting….

Hubby came home today and told me he saw Tracy at the store.  They said nothing to each other.

He’s certain that after all this time, they’re not going to come to my church.  I don’t know about that, since they did check the service schedule on Christmas Eve.  (I run the website.  I didn’t go to the Christmas service.)  But then again, that was months ago, and the merger with their old church is common knowledge by now.

So maybe things will be fine.  In any case, I have friends who can rally around me if necessary.  They care and know my character, in case of attacks.  But maybe it won’t be a thing.  Or maybe R/T won’t come often enough to cause trouble.

What amazes me, though, is that anyone can go so many years knowing they’ve hurt another person, see that person or her husband around town on occasion, and never, ever once say, “I’m sorry.”  Or “I’m sorry I hurt your wife.  Please tell her so.”  Or “I’m sorry for causing drama in your life.”

Never once.  Ever.

And, in fact, defend their nastiness and refuse to admit they ever did anything wrong.

Which explains why they have a string of lost friendships.  I’m hardly the first, and there probably have been others after me.

Heck, I tried apologizing to her for hurting her when this all happened, even though I was the victim of her abuse.

Even my abusive or narcissistic exes have apologized to me.  Even people who bullied me in school have apologized to and/or made peace with me.

I don’t understand this.  I also don’t understand people treating others like this in the first place, the way she and her husband treated me.

People are making a big deal in the news lately about “Wisconsin Nice.”  Well, I can tell you that R/T aren’t from around here, or even the Midwest, for that matter.  Not that Wisconsin people can’t be rats: Even Canadians have some bad apples.  Narcissists, abusers and plain ol’ nasty people are everywhere.  But yeah, don’t let this crap I got from these people, make you think badly of Wisconsin people.  😛  Most people I know, don’t act like this.

But prayers/good wishes, please, for my continued healing and growing strength.

Now my church is officially merging with my abusers’ church…..

The announcement came out in the media this week.  I voted in favor of the merger because it seemed to be in the best interest of both churches, and because people (at least in my church) were nearly unanimous.

But it will be interesting:

Tracy–from what Richard and a once-mutual friend have told me, and what I myself have observed–apparently has inherited an abusive form of Borderline Personality Disorder and/or other disorders from her mother.  Her behavior interlaps with Narcissistic Personality Disorder as well.  She has caused trouble with other friends and in other churches, from what I’ve seen and what Richard has told me.

And Richard himself shows many signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  He claims to have hypnotized me without my knowledge, and he manipulated me.

Both have demonstrated stalker tendencies as well, and have even tried to intimidate me at church.

And both of them are child abusers.

And neither of them have ever admitted to abusing me, or to the legitimacy of my pain, or to the fact that I deserve an apology.

In fact, they told me they laughed at my pain.  These are your classic Christians-In-Name-Only.

I admit a certain trepidation at the thought of the poison that could now enter my church.  I hope they will not destroy it.  Though I hope the priest would be able to stop any such thing.

Of course, I have no clue if my abusers are still involved in the other church.  It hasn’t held services for three years, so they very well could’ve moved on to someplace they like better.  These days, all I know about my abusers is that they still live somewhere in town, even though one of their regular, confirmed IPs shows up in my blog stat trackers as Missouri.  Hubby believes he saw them walking a dog near our house three weeks ago.

Several years ago, one friend told me that church could be a good influence on my abusers, so not to be too upset about seeing them there.  At this point, I can’t tell them to stay away if it’s also their church.  But sharing the Eucharist and other church activities could be terribly problematic.

I also have many friends in my church.  Then there’s my BFF at that church, a fellow convert-NOT-by-marriage, introvert, writer and German-speaker.  🙂  I haven’t felt lonely for a long time.  Maybe they will help me feel safer.

I will have to play things by ear.

Hubby says they may not even come, but if they do and try to badmouth me, the people there know me way too well to listen to them.  It would only go back on them.

Or who knows, maybe they’ll take advantage of tomorrow’s Forgiveness Sunday (Orthodox thing right before Lent) to make peace.

But in any case, if my abusers start coming to my church, things will get interesting.  Please pray for me, or good wishes, or whatever you do.

StalkerQuote

 

Had another one of those dreams this morning…. (forgiveness?)

The ones where Richard and I see each other out and about, and just sit and start talking pleasantly.  We patch things up.  In this one, I beckoned him over and asked how he was.  He even talked about Tracy like she was working on herself, and they were happy now.

I don’t know where this came from, because I’ve barely thought of them at all for some time, except while doing site maintenance on old posts.

Could it be…forgiveness of a sort, showing up in my dreams?

I recall, years ago, having dreams of my abusive ex Phil, too, some 15 years after I last saw him.  I asked Richard about it, and he said maybe it’s closure.  Maybe that’s the case here, too.

It’s probably come into my dreams again because on Sunday, we vote on whether or not to merge with Richard’s church.  (That is, assuming he still has anything to do with it or even still lives in town.)

Maybe I’m at the point where anger can cease, but without putting me at risk of further pain or naïveté.  The anger was a talisman for years, warding off a return to depression.  I don’t need it anymore.

As of tomorrow, it will be two months since my stalkers’ last visit here….

I probably can stop calling them my stalkers now.  😉  They just seem to have dropped off the face of the earth for some reason.  🙂  It’s almost as if they don’t exist anymore, except as an unpleasant memory.

In the meantime, I am so heavily into rewriting the Unwilling Time-Traveler series that I can barely think of anything else.  My muse has finally returned after some time gone, giving me ideas and helping me fix various plot holes.

I also have, at my fingertips, a whole wealth of historical information to make the story ring authentic.  I didn’t have anything like the Internet when I first wrote it.  So far, any question I have, a simple Google search brings up the answer.

I have changed some things to give the story a whole new element that also makes it more grown-up.  It has charged the entire thing with a new energy.  I’m not going to spoil it for you, but just write and see where it leads.  But keep the old story up, because I am rather fond of it.

See?  A post began about my former stalkers, becomes a post about my writing project.  It used to be that dealing with my stalkers was always on my mind.  Now, my writing is, and it is far more pleasant.

I feel alive again.  Happy.  🙂

(Well, except when I think about pending WWIII.  But this post is not about that.)

 

Ten years since I first met my abusers…..

I’m not sure of the exact day or month, but this is around the time that I first met Richard and Tracy online, back in 2005, back on the Forum on the old EZboards….Richard got me interested in Orthodoxy, which consumed me in 2006 until I finally began attending the local church in November 2006.

My, how time flies.  It’s still like yesterday.  And yet….Back then, I don’t believe I’d heard of Youtube yet, we still used dialup, and well–we still used EZboard.  Everybody used Myspace and we had not heard of Facebook.  I spent my Net time on web forums rather than blogs or Facebook.  And my son was still a baby….

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