Hi KC,
Two things strike me:
him offering me sexually to men without my knowledge (or, needless to say, consent)
This is horrifically demeaning and when you have finished leaving him, you will for the rest of your life look back at the moment when you recognized that you actually valued yourself enough for this to be a dealbreaker, as your moment of liberation.
At the same time that you discover what it feels like to say NO, you may encounter a lot of shame and grief that you let yourself be disrespected profoundly for so long by a very unhealthy man. I hope you won't blame yourself. It's really not necessary to pile on...you've had it bad enough that you don't need to beat yourself up for neglecting yourself. All that would be is more badness. No benefit.
Low self-respect is a symptom of an ill self, and nearly everybody here has had the illness in one way or another, as well as have most people you see walking down the street. The boundary-less person, particularly the woman, is created by so many things: not just by FOO dysfunctions (epidemic), but by our entire culture, myths of romance, sexism, and so many other currents that pull a strong growing girl child under and stuff her bright psyche with mud and gauze. She surfaces years later in a toxic relationship, feeling used and sick, and wonders why.
You don't have to have all the answers or reasons nailed down before you decide to save yourself. You don't have to justify it or have a seamless narrative about why it's the "right choice". You can just save yourself.
The second thing I felt alerted by was the effect of his emails on you. (Fasten seat belt, speech coming.)
IMO, email is a toxic trap, flypaper, for people trying to disentangle themselves from a destructive relationship. For Ns in particular, email eloquence is as cheap as cheese. Their outstandingly subtle radar helps them say all the right things to push buttons, tease a response, seduce you back, make you feel guilty, play on your loneliness and fear, remind you of what you did love, hum the old hypnotic notes, remind you of the pleasanter parts of the personality, etc.--smart Ns are made for this. Email is an ideal vehicle for them. But it's a dangerous place for YOU, because as a person who has lacked healthy normal self-respect...you may feel artificially safe in email. (Smart as you are...
emails can bore into your mental soundness and create leaks in your protection in a different way than other communication does.)
[I lived through a "hitting bottom" thing about the role I had let email play in my own worst entanglement with an N. I read and thought about it for a couple years. I realized I hid there and many other subtle things about their effect on me. Now I will not address anything that in the pre-email world would have required confrontation or "holding the line" with someone not good for me, by email.]
It's subtle and complicated but: email gives those of us with shaky selves a false sense of having adequate borders. E.g., "I am here. My message is in the email and I am controlling it. I send it when I want, or I don't. I can edit it very carefully. I can keep things in my Inbox and Outbox. It's all nice and contained here in my computer -- I have it captured here behind this screen. Both the ones I get and the ones I send. I actually have control over the ones I receive because I can answer or not." [False: the words enter your mind--you are helpless over when one arrives--
bing!--and vulnerable and alone when you read it and take it into your mind, which is involuntary and a literal result of you reading it--you do NOT have control. Block Sender is control. Like Return to Sender --unopened--used to be for physical mail. Anything else is: come into my psyche. I'm going to let you in...because I'm not really serious about taking care of myself, defending my precious mind against what is harmful.]
Email is not a safe place for dialogue about anything that affects your life in a big way. You have LESS control and you are MORE vulnerable to those messages in some ways. That Inbox can open right into your psyche.
I don't know all of why that is but I feel it strongly. There's nothing he can say by email that will make anything real that isn't already real. And nothing that will undo the falseness that's already false.
I wish you strength in this passage. I'm happy for you that you are going through it because you deserve to strengthen your self (you CAN build a strong self) and build your new life. And I don't think this relationship is what your life should be.
Fast-forward to your deathbed (sorry). Look back and say to yourself, look how I spent my one and only precious life. With whom.
Welcome!
Hops
