“You believe decent men exist, but they don’t want you, or you can’t get to them. Maybe that’s a belief you have? Sorry if I am barking on the wrong tree with his, but I do get the feeling that there is deeper belief involved, which possibly makes things harder for you.”

It’s not so much a belief, just my experience up to this point. It could change tomorrow (that would be great). Part of me still hopes it does, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now. But so far it hasn’t.

“Oh I see, so she has good parents and you get along well with them, right? But you still want to protect her and be in her vicinity, even if that means being surrounded by other, abusive relatives? Sorry for poking, but I am just wondering if you do have to sacrifice yourself – since she actually has people (her parents) to protect her and take good care of her? I mean, you could still keep in touch and be included in parts of her life even if you don’t live in her vicinity.”

She is the only really good thing in my life and the one thing that brings me real happiness. Seeing her gives me motivation to get back up and keep going. My nephews live miles away and I hardly get to see them, and there isn’t much else keeping me going other than sticking around to see her grow up and making sure she has a very different life to the one I had. So it isn’t just that I feel obligated to stay and ‘sacrifice myself’. It would tear me apart to move away and barely see her. I’d have nothing else left. She isn’t my biological daughter, but I helped raise her due to issues my sister had when she was young, and we still have that sort of relationship. So it would be like someone moving away from their child. It would be soul destroying. And as I mentioned, I have a few other relatives here that I get on well with (one who also has a very toxic parent, so sort of understands me). I don’t have much of a social network since cutting ties with a lot of other people. So if I moved away then I’d be going from near isolation to total isolation.

“Okay, so it’s your father who is still abusive to you, but you’re now trying to stand up for yourself and fight him, rather than just accept whatever he throws at you. But it’s tiring.”

Not just him, but he does it a lot. My mother tends to just talk over me or randomly forgets I exist. Although I think she has ADHD and is just ‘away with the fairies’ a lot rather than meaning anything malicious by it. She just lacks awareness in general and/or goes along with whatever other people say to keep the peace.

“Right, so your parents were lying about you and created a false image of you, and you then needed to explain to people that you’re not this person they believed you are. May I ask what kind of picture did your parents paint about you?”

It was mostly just that everything was somehow my fault. A lot of people in my family have a very fragile ego, can’t accept blame and need to keep a very inflated view of themselves. Some get around that by being avoidant and going AWOL for months/years, some are more histrionic and create drama to redirect the focus, others (like my dad) find someone else to blame if anything goes wrong. I was an easy target, so I was gossiped about and blamed to make him look better. So I seemed like an incompetant, selfish, useless idiot who was failing in life and he was the heroic father who never made a mistake, did everything for everyone and had to put up with me. If I did have any real issues, then it was made out to be deliberate. For example, I struggle with left and right due to dyslexia and took several attempts to pass my driving test. I was already embarrassed about that and stressed due to all the extra money I had to pay out for lessons. But my dad told people the reason I ‘refused’ to get a licence was because I didn’t want to give him and my mother lifts if they went out drinking. He reframed it as me being selfish and making things difficult for him. I also worked hard to save up for university, while also paying them rent towards their second property and paying for medical things I had to get done back then. But someone started a rumour that my parents had paid for me to go to university and certain relatives got angry at me (I didn’t realise this until much later). But  instead of clearing things up and telling people ‘actually no, she worked her ass off before/during uni and and took out loans which she paid back herself’ they ‘didn’t want to get involved in the drama’. So I ended up having to show a relative copies of my bank statements for several years just to stop the lie. It benefited my dad having people think he had supported me rather than the other way around. I’ve given my parents a lot of money over the years, but that would contradict my dad’s ‘hero’ complex. He’s also made some pretty terrible financial decisions in the past, which he says are my fault. I worked in finance and tried to warn him not to make certain investments, but he ignored me and did it anyway. Then later argued that it was my fault he made the investment as I should have stopped him.

A lot of people that I end up arguing with are people like my dad with very fragile, overblown egos, who want to be the hero and act like they are helping this incompetant little woman (even the women, as in hindsight a lot of them initially tried to have this weird dynamic with me where they acted like a big sister/mother). Then when they realise I’m not that, and they aren’t the hero, it dents their ego. Then they try to lash out either directly and/or by sabotaging me, then get mad when I fight back.

“And you’re trying to prove something to him, which is in vain. You’re exposing yourself to his venom, and trying to neutralize it and wash it off from your skin all the time. Which is incredibly tiring. Whereas the only good solution would be to leave the toxic place. To stop exposing yourself to his abuse.”

I’ve given up trying to prove anything to him. I don’t consider him my father any more except in name and made peace with that a long time ago. I couldn’t care less if he genuinely thinks I’m a worthless piece of sh*t, as I don’t value his opinion. My only concern is stopping complete strangers believing his lies about me, as some of those people I do respect. And with other people (not my dad) who treat me this way, it has a very real damaging impact on my life. For example, having my career derailed more than once. I would love to live in a world where gossip doesn’t matter and people are judged on purely on merit. But I’ve realised that isn’t and will never be how the world works, and therefore I can’t just ignore gossip or I’ll keep losing out to toxic people.

“I hope you can see this. That you don’t have to keep sacrificing yourself and staying in that abusive, toxic environment.”

I understand what you are saying, and in the past I have moved all over the world in an attempt to get away from this. However, that didn’t fix the problem. I can physically run away from my family, but there are other people just like them in the world. I can’t just avoid dealing with toxic people and run away every time I meet one, that isn’t realistic. I want to know what I’m doing to attract them, how to identify them more quickly (as they always seem really nice at first, which throws me off guard), how to better stand up for myself (or at least try to) without exhaustion, and how to fix the damage they cause to my life.

I did partly enable it. I accept that I made the choice to reconnect with him. No one forced me to. I’d been on my own for so long that I guess I wanted to believe the universe was giving me a second chance. In hindsight I know that was delusional.

I’ve made it clear to K that I don’t want to stay friends and have remained NC since, but being alone yet again isn’t any better. I’m much better at setting boundaries than I used to be and willing to walk away. But the main issue is the lack of options I have. If I was given the choice between someone healthy and emotionally open and someone damaged like K, I would take the first man without a second thought. I don’t want to date/marry someone that is emotionally avoidant or who just wants to use me. I preferred those men when I was younger, as I thought that was all I deserved. But that’s changed now. I know I deserve to have a partner that treats me well. If women can be rewarded with love and marriage for treating men like trash, then at the very least I should be rewarded the same for not treating men like that. In an ideal world, I would be treated better than those women, but I appreciate that’s not how it works. But I want to find someone that can at least treat me like an equal partner, be open and honest and loyal and not abusive. But just because I believe I deserve that doesn’t mean other people do, and so far I haven’t met any healthy men that are a match who want to date me. So it feels as if I’m always having to pick the ‘least bad’ option or just stay alone forever. And both are painful.

I’ve given up on the idea of motherhood, as (even ignoring my age) I have other medical issues that would make it very difficult to naturally have a child. The cost/pain involved just wouldn’t be worth it, even if I had the money and a partner willing to go through that. I’ve made peace with that. I was hoping I could still be a step mum or adopt, but that hasn’t happened either.

“How is your life in other areas, apart from love life?”

Not great. I seem to attract emotionally dead people in other areas of my life too. Which makes me think I’m giving off some kind of signal that makes people assume I’m an easy target. I don’t look physically intimidating, so I think people assume they can get away with whatever and I can’t/won’t fight back. I prefer talking to people online, as they tend to assume I’m either a guy and/or much older and talk to me like an equal. In real life it’s very different.

I met someone fairly similar to K through a different job that also tried hitting on me while his wife was busy asking us to hook her up with other men. And another employee there was intimidated by me and started spreading gossip that led to me being pushed out of that job. So I now do contract work, as I finally got tired of working myself into the floor only for other people to be rewarded for it. It’s nice not having to worry about office politics and to be able to focus on the work itself. I’m used to hard work, so I don’t mind the long hours. And I work on a lot of socially useful projects rather than just making profit for the sake of profit. But it’s bittersweet, as I really enjoyed working in a team and got on well with everyone else there until the gossiping started. So I don’t have much of a social life these days. But the M’s in life always seem to win I’m not willing to play those games to get ahead. I want to be rewarded based on skill and effort rather than whether I’m willing to lie, steal and throw other people under the bus. So for now I think I’ll be working alone indefinitely.

I’ve cut ties with a lot of the toxic people I grew up with, as they didn’t want me to change and improve my life. So I have less drama to deal with there. The relatives that I still have to speak to are slowly getting the message not to drag me into things or try to blame me for their screw ups. But it’s still their default response a lot of the time, as for years I would just sit and take it. That’s always been my ‘role’, and it’s difficult getting other people to accept that has changed. It feels as if I have to keep a permanent barbed wire fence around me now, as I’m constantly having to defend myself and remind people to treat me with basic respect. Which I guess is better than being the doormat/punchbag I was for the first 30 years of my life. But it gets tiring. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for people. I spend a lot more time alone these days, as I get exhausted being on guard all the time. If I didn’t have young family here, I would just move away. But that isn’t realistic for at least another decade.

I ended things with K (I explained the above to him, but it didn’t seem to make much difference). I know he had a bad childhood and thinks abuse is normal. He was treated like that by his mother after his dad left, so he only knows how to be a bank account and doormat to women. He grew up with constant fighting and on-off relationship drama so I guess that’s normal to him and if he’s not being used and mistreated it doesn’t feel like ‘love’. He’s aware of that, but he thinks it’s too late to really change anything now. As he sees it, he’s already done everything with both his ex wives and doesn’t see the point in repeating everything just for it to blow up in his face again. He feels the risk it too high, even though he thinks he can trust me not to be like them. I don’t believe he does trust me.

But I don’t know if leaving him was any better, as now I’m just completely alone again. I tried to get back into dating, but haven’t had a single match let alone a date so that has been pointless and I’m just feeling like I missed the boat on having a life. K still wants to be friends, but it’s too painful. It’s like winning the lottery, then having the ticket stolen from you before you can cash it. Then watching someone else spend most of the money, and years later having the ticket waved in your face as a reminder of everything you lost and can never have. Maybe that’s being immature, but it hurts too much to even look at him now.

I’m just really tired of life. It feels like I’m too far away from where I need to be and I can’t see any realistic way of getting there. You say I ‘deserve more’ and I agree with that. But I don’t think I’ll ever get what I deserve. At least not without a time machine.