Do toxic people know what the discarded and rejected feel when they inevitably return or try to reestablish contact? I know that decent people who just had a moment of stupid do. It’s why they go about it differently. They go about it honestly. They stay away until they have decided for certain what they want to do. They don’t flip back and forth because they know this just makes things worse. If they decide that they don’t want to lose you, they say, because they’ve probably experienced being screwed, that they care and don’t want to be forgotten.
It’s not the standard, “I hope we can be friends.” They’re aware that they hurt someone and what that means. They know that you’re asking yourself if every positive interaction you had up to that point was just a lie. They want you to know it wasn’t a lie, and that they are still the same person, but just that the context has to change. They give you the option of accepting or rejecting the offer. They own what they did. They take responsibility. They let you curse them and rage at them, and they take whatever venom is coming and don’t judge you for it. They hold on and don’t leave no matter what.
Because it’s not you they are discarding. It’s not you they are rejecting. It’s the frame for your interactions that they are changing or that they are accepting have changed because the situation did not allow it to stay the same.
Two such men reminded me over the last few days what manhood looks like in that regard. One hurt me in a way that almost made me kill him, and did kill his child that I was carrying. I miscarried from internalizing the shock. He checked on me even though he knows that I hate him and important aspects of what he believes in, or at least what he said he believed at the crucial moment. He’s stayed in touch even though I never answered him until yesterday. That’s 12 years.
The other, who y’all know as Papa 2, has been very helpful through the whole toxicity of that last relationship, through the two breakups and the healing, and through this most recent mindfuck. He was the one who warned me during the phase of, “Why can’t I seem to win with this guy?” that the guy was full of shit. Because he experienced some of these feelings himself and recognized a familiar pattern, he did bring up the possibility that Last is jealous of me and/or feels small next to me. The one way that he figures he has to take me down is through my heart. So he uses that.
The thing is, Papa 2 had the courtesy to stay away from me until he sorted himself out. When he did, he didn’t bullshit me.
Things end. Sometimes things even end badly. If the people involved are decent though, the pain doesn’t have to escalate.
I wish I could say that I don’t understand why someone would want to hurt me. I do though. Some people have this thing inside them that is desperate and hungry and they think the best way to feed that is other people’s pain. It feels good to them to hurt people.
Not everyone is wired that way though. Thank goodness.
Still, once I can no longer touch someone in trust, I forget them. I forget their smell. I forget what their touch feels like. There’s a headline in my memory to say I hit that at some point, but in time I don’t remember any of it. I shut it out for the same reason I had to learn to shut out the gory details of the sexual abuse.
The psyche is not a courtroom. I don’t need to preserve the evidence forever. To the inner child, being conned into sex is the same as being raped. It’s someone taking something intimate from you that they were not entitled to. That one was a willing participant under the deception that this person wanted you as more than a hole to basically defecate in, makes it all the more disgusting. It’s as if you were drugged and used while unconscious. The safety that was supposed to be there in which you could receive and give of your sexuality was all an illusion.
This is why some women go nuts and reframe regretted sex as rape if the guy disrespects them afterwards. This is a shitty thing to do legally, but as far as one’s healing is concerned, one has to deal with the heart as it is, not as pop psychologists say that it should be. When someone hurts me sexually, I have to let those memories go because to hold them would kill me. It would make me bitter and paranoid, and my mind would be plagued with the disgusting sensations of someone who didn’t value me touching me, someone who didn’t value me feeling my body, inciting pleasure, opening me just to hurt me or abandon me.
When they remind me of their existence, it is reminding me of the moment I realized or they revealed that I gave an intimate aspect of myself to someone who did not value it and therefore did not deserve it. If they are not returning with anything valuable to me like protection or provisions, I want nothing to do with them. If they are not returning to undo the damage, they should stay away, because as I’ve said many times before, once someone shows me that they don’t care about me, I treat them accordingly.
I have compassion for all human beings, but same as a mad dog, some people are too crazy and harmful to say that their continued breathing is the compassionate option. At lower levels, someone who intends to plague my life and continue to harm me will meet effective self defense. I will strike in a way so as to deter future assaults.
I prioritize my mental health over the lusts of harmful people who enjoy my suffering.
So they should let me forget them. They already used their one chance to really make me suffer. If they keep trying to hurt me, I will hurt them in the only ways that I understand a psycho can be hurt. This ain’t my first rodeo.
