Reblog: The Narc and Male Friends

Sofia Lee tells her story of a jealous, possessive husband in The Narc and Male Friends.  I especially noted how he would lecture her on her “inappropriate” behavior, even though there was nothing wrong with it.

Tracy was the same way, raging at and lecturing me and, apparently, keeping her husband beaten down as well, over innocent behavior, calling it “inappropriate” and not allowing me to disagree.

It wasn’t just me: I heard the stories from him about other women as well, ones who didn’t pass her approval, especially during hormonal spikes.  Meanwhile, the rules she put on him and on me, she did not follow herself.  It’s all in my story, linked here.

One of these “inappropriate” behaviors was wanting to speak privately with Richard.  Sofia Lee also writes,

Friends, especially girlfriends, are all too likely to point out his douche behavior and convince you to do something about it, so they are a risk. Private conversations are a risk for the abuser. He needs you to be isolated, scared and insecure in order to torture you some more.

Then there was Kym railing on Sabrina in a narcissistic rage on Breaking Amish; my post about that is here.  On blogs and Facebook’s Breaking Amish pages, a lot of people hated Kym’s rage at Sabrina, calling it “trailer trash” and “ghetto” behavior, and sticking up for Sabrina.

That’s how I felt, too, and it was just like Tracy’s behavior with me.

“Kym has no business trying to control Sabrina, but needs to get Jeremiah under control,” they said.  (Or better yet, she needed to break up with Jeremiah because he’s a player who was screwing with Sabrina’s head.)

Then there were my exes.  I never was jealous of Peter’s female friends, yet he accused me (not to me, but to a mutual friend) of a “jealous look.”

This was ridiculous because I was not jealous of his friends, whether male or female.  He had a female friend he wrote to often; I was not even jealous of her, though I’d never even met her.

If anything, he may have misinterpreted my frustration the last few weeks of the relationship, when we’d be at lunch but he gave me zero attention, focusing instead on the other people at the table.  Then whenever we walked around campus, he’d act like he didn’t want to be with me.

He spent very little time with me outside of class and lunch during those last few weeks, yet gave me no, or angry, attention when we were together.

My feeling ignored, is no reason to break up with me or use as some kind of justification for the breakup, telling all his friends I was jealous when I was not.  If you read my college memoirs, you can see how he manipulated me, and later conducted a smear campaign against me.

Phil told me we should tell each other when we were attracted to someone else, so a breakup wouldn’t be a surprise.

Then he spent all summer telling me he wanted three wives: me, his brother’s fiancée, and some other girl who liked him.  We’d go get some fast food and he’d tell me he wanted to take the big-breasted girl at the drive-thru window, into the back of his minivan.

He also told me he was a sex addict who–if we weren’t living together that summer–would not be able to control himself from sleeping around.

When I got upset at him telling me about all these women he wanted to sleep with, he called me “possessive.”

Then, near the end of our relationship, when I told him (as per his instructions, above) that I was attracted to our friend Mike, he went ballistic.  Tried to force me to tell Mike.  Tried to force me to make a decision between us, even though I was already with Phil.

Even got a friend of his, Dirk, to lecture and harangue me because I told Phil I loved him but liked Mike.  It was hypocrisy.

Oh yeah, people like this are everywhere, male and female.  They’re the jealous ones, but accuse you of “inappropriate” behavior while they’re allowed to do whatever they like. 

Don’t let them; if you have never slept with the people they’re jealous about, then get away from them if they won’t listen to reason, because it won’t get better over time. 

As you can see from Sofia Lee’s post, jealousy is used to isolate you from people who see the abuse for what it is, and can help you.