Dear Karen:

Welcome back. I just spent a few hours reading your previous threads starting February 2016.

You shared before that you grew up with a mother who is severely hearing impaired and therefore communication with her was always severely lacking, but so was your communication with your hearing father. You grew up very much isolated within your small family where you still live on a five acre land with a nice view and lots of animals.

In April 2016 you shared that before your job in 2015, you were “out of work for a very long time.. having been severely socially phobic for most of my whole adult life”, you shared that you were raped when you were 14, that at the time you accidently found your father’s “large pornography magazines hidden in a cupboard while you looked for lollies (lollipops), felt compelled to read them all, and that made you feel so uncomfortable around your father. At 15 you started to wet the bed every night, dropped out of last year of high school and “became agoraphobic for years”.

You saw the first female therapist when you were 22, and stopped wetting the bed, but you were still socially phobic. At 24 (2007) you discovered a forum where people with body image problems (you self diagnosed yourself with Body Dysmorphic Disorder at one point) communicated and you got to chat with a man. You were “so naïve and smitten” and agreed to take the your first plane flight and visit him. Before you visited him, you “crash dieted and over exercised to 42 kg” (92.5 lb). You took that flight (a great achievement for a person with your fears), and felt euphoric for making the fight and for losing all that weight.

But when you met him he “was not very friendly”, looked at you in disgust, wasn’t motivated to show you around the famous city where he lived, sat at his computer with his back turned to you when in his place, and raped you on the first night. The next morning he told you that you looked terrible and that if you weighed more you would be okay. You gained weight so to please him and stayed with him for four months. He slept with you often, “but no affection and even criticizing my body and how I look in bed- to how I walked and talked and everything in between”. When in public, he walked away from you “like I was an embarrassment (despite putting healthy weight on)”, he ate his food in a café and left you there to eat on your own.

You wrote: “I don’t know why I stayed- I just wanted him to like me I guess”. Eventually he told you to leave on your own, then begrudgingly took you to the airport, dropped you off and “blasted away.. No wave”. Back home with your parents, you were “mute for 6 months. I didn’t talk to anyone.. didn’t even see the daylight”.

From 2007 to 2015, you “had been very low in self esteem, overweight, and avoiding anyone except my parents and close family”, as well as your animals, finding it “hard to go out in public and to be around people.. so low in self esteem… severe anxiety and body image issues and insecurities”.

And then 2015 came, and it “was one of the best years I have had in a very long time”, you were on disability at the time and didn’t have to work, but you took on a job. “And by doing that, my whole life has changed”. You met this guy at work, the guy suffering from schizophrenia, Nick. He followed you around, opened the door for you, talked to you a lot, and you developed a crush, volunteering to work on weekends just so to be around him. You lost weight, made “huge changes in my appearance and body image. For once in my life I started to like what I saw and discovered fashion for once and looked after myself”. Working there you discovered “a purpose and an identity- a hard worker and I developed muscles too”.

December 2015, he asked you out for the first time, and the two of you spent New Year’s Eve having a meal, and spending the night at his place (a garage, part of his parents’ property), watching some films. You sat on one sofa and he sat on another, and later, the two of  you slept separately. You left the morning after. Following that night he didn’t ask you out for months, and you were anxious during those months, hoping he’ll ask you out again (“the worst part was the waiting”). Sometimes he flirted with you, at other times he ignored you, and you were confused.

During that time, he told you repeatedly about a certain woman he used to know somewhat, a woman who had an “angel face”, so beautiful.. and he had lots of blond women photos in his Facebook, a few were famous singers, and all were women he didn’t know personally, women he referred to as “hot”. He photoshopped his image into the photos of these women and added hearts and romantic songs and whatnot. Plus posted 1000 selfies of himself there.

You were upset by his stories about that one woman and by his collection of blond “hot” women on his Facebook, and you tried to compete with those women by losing weight, from 85 kg (187 lb), to nearly 55 kg (121 lb), gaining muscle because of the physical nature of the job,  dressing attractively and even tried bleaching your natural brown hair so to appear blond. But his obsessions with the other woman/ Facebook images continued nonetheless, and he “would ignore me often”. You “felt un-special… every weekend I get very, very depressed”. You used to “get very lonely until the next working days”.

Finally there was a second date, had a meal, went to his place, watched a film and then you went home. At work he didn’t talk to you much, then he completely ignored you for a week, you were confused, didn’t understand (“Am I a friend to this guy- 0r what? I don’t understand”).

In June 2016, you shared more about your body dysphoria, how you worried about looking too thin: “Like in Easter, when the whole family came  over.. and last time I was very overweight.. this time I was slim.. yet nobody said a thing and its though they looked at me like I had a disease or something. That lead me to think of myself as looking sickly and too thin”.

A year later, June 2017, about two years after you met Nick, you shared that he was fired from his job some time before, that he had no money other than a pension he gets, that he doesn’t have a job and he isn’t looking for any, that he still lives in his parents’ double garage, that he is a strong smoker, has breathing issues where “he holds his breath all the time among other things”, that he used to  smoke dope for many years. That for years he smoked ice, a methamphetamine, having spent $100 almost very week or fortnight on it when he used to work, and still uses it once a month. That he “has to go to the doctor every fortnight to get a jab of Risperdal which is a strong anti- psychotic”, that he has “no energy to do anything and lacks attention span too”, and that “Most of the time, he is in a daze and he is always smoking and pacing and in his own world”.

And he thinks he has a future with you, talks about having kids with me, growing old together, wants you to spend every night with him even though he goes to bed early, that after a long day of work you rush to his place “only to get to his place and he would just be sitting on his computer looking at his millions of selfies or his Facebook page and basically ignore me the entire time”. You wrote that “he has changes so much for the better” because of you, that you are his world, and that he has no idea that you are thinking of breaking up with him. “how to I break up with someone who thinks that he has the rest of his life with me and that has nothing else in his life really but me?”, you asked 2.5 years ago.

Two and a half years later, January 2020, you shared that back in 2016 you “became the independent confident person I got glimpse of in times I was well in the past”, that you felt “socially full” and that lasted three years, you shared how you felt “like striking gold that a guy like me”, the guy being Nick. But you have “had to endure an extreme amount of distress and dysfunction from him” and you’ve been “badly burnt”, “burnt out shell of a person”, that you have let him “basically take over my life through his own dysfunctions”, that now you understand that a person with schizophrenia is unable to “take control and plan… unable to make goals without a lot of help.. basically couldn’t manage their live like a normal person or that they couldn’t concentrate on things and have issues with hygiene and not understanding boundaries etc.”, that you are “obese and dealing with adrenal fatigue” and that your body in the last two years is “in a dire state of bed time and aches and pains and chronic fatigue and brain fog, breathlessness, and “it really is a huge struggle to keep up with daily things”.

And now, my input today: it is a very difficult experience for a child to grow up in a home where social isolation is so extreme. Reads to me that your mother, because of her disability was unable to communicate effectively with you (or with your father, I am guessing). Finding his large collection of pornography in the context of that extreme social isolation was traumatic for you. I think it was shocking and your extreme discomfort regarding your body, its femininity and otherwise, started right there and then, if not before.

Your experience of rape at 14 and even worse, having been raped and so severely mistreated at 24 for four months was horrendous.

It is a testimony of your resilience and intelligence that you survived such a childhood and later experiences.

The job at 34 was a wonderful experience for you, to be around people, to find out that you are a hard worker,  to work hard physically and develop muscles, those were great things.

Your very low self esteem and social isolation at home and outside work otherwise, caused you to over- value Nicks’ attention toward you and you got hooked on it early on. Fast forward, this relationship exhausted you and you considered breaking up with him 2.5 years ago. Yet you kept at it and now you are even more exhausted and your health is suffering.

Nick’s mental health is poor, not only does he suffer from schizophrenia, but he abuses methamphetamine. All that you shared about him indicates that he has not been making any significant progress toward better health, if he smoked heavily before, that didn’t change because he is still smoking heavily, and he used to work but he no longer does, he doesn’t consider a new job. This is  regression, not progression.

Your physical and mental health is suffering greatly because of this relationship.

Time to end this relationship, isn’t it?

Ending this relationship will not be easy, but it needs to be done so that you can again progress toward physical and mental health.

You still work at the same place, I understand?

anita