Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High Conflict Divorce, And How To Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances

By Lisa Johnson and Chris Barry

Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances, offers practical advice for anyone suffering in or struggling to get out of a relationship with a narcissist or other toxic personality types. Packed with practical facts, tips and advice, this

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordeee
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781946274960

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Our guess is that if you’ve picked up this book, on some level, something is wrong, seriously wrong, with a major relationship in your life. Someone you’ve loved and trusted has betrayed you deeply, possibly far more than you ever imagined possible.

You might also finally be confronting the fact that you’ve given this relationship far more chances than you would like to admit and realizing that no matter how hard you keep trying, it feels like you or your efforts will never be good enough.

You cannot fix what has probably been broken repeatedly (and most likely, not by you). And although you want to do anything possible to keep the relationship and especially your family intact, you might be realizing that you’ve already worked on yourself and have run through most, if not all, of your options.

At this point, things may have gotten so bad that the thought of staying hurts more than the idea of leaving. This has become unbearable for you, and probably for your kids as well.

The fact that you’re waking up to what’s going on—that you’re starting to trust your feelings—is a huge step.

We know the pain and confusion you must be experiencing right now because we’ve both been there. We know the devastating rollercoaster of emotions, and how overwhelming it feels right now. It felt the exact same way for each of us, and it took so much to get to the breaking point.

Take a breath. If you can relate to anything above, know that we spend our days guiding people through situations just like yours. And the silver lining to all of it is that you are not alone. Not even close.

This book will help you start to work through things and will serve as a practical survival guide through what could very well be one of the most difficult periods of your life.

Why this book is necessary

Abusive relationships have made headlines of late with the #MeToo movement, as women in droves (and a sprinkling of men) are coming forward to expose what they have suffered in their relationships. Still, for all the publicity, abuse has received in recent years, narcissism and related disorders are still largely misunderstood.

As big a global problem as personality related disorders are, the real nightmare is when they are affecting your own life. If you are mired in a toxic relationship, you probably:

Have suffered through years of emotional and/or physical abuse, possibly without even realizing it.

Wonder what you can do better to change your partner’s behavior.

Spin your wheels with marriage counseling and other efforts doomed to failure.

Stay for the kids (one of the worst things you can do).

Convince yourself that marriage is hard and that your situation is normal.

Feel completely isolated from any kind of support network, in fear that nobody would understand.

Feel ashamed and don’t want to admit to family and friends that there’s anything wrong, preferring instead to keep up appearances.

Struggle to envision any way to be happy in the future if the relationship ends.

The lack of broad awareness of toxic relationships leads to many people having no idea what to expect when the relationship ends—especially as it relates to the legal system. It’s like you’re being sent into battle already injured with no guidebook or plan of action.

Divorce is difficult for anyone, but for the estimated 15% ending a relationship with a toxic partner, it can often be a nightmare. It’s usually not just about two people who don’t get along with each other! Instead, it’s a dirty fight that seems like it will never end, and, often, only one person is the cause of the trouble.

Frequently, friends, family members, attorneys, and even many therapists don’t understand that your toxic situation is fundamentally different from a normal breakup or divorce, which can make you feel particularly alone at a time when you need support more than ever. We’ll dive into more detail on the risks of staying in a high-conflict relationship in Chapters 3 and 4.

Why us?

Lisa is a state-certified domestic violence advocate, and Chris is a certified high-conflict divorce coach. Although we aren’t attorneys, and we definitely do not give legal advice, we intimately understand many of the legal issues around divorce and custody, and are knowledgeable about specific strategies and ways to present yourself that can give you the best chance for success in the legal system and beyond. These are the kinds of training we provide to our coaching clients, many of whom are in for a legal fight worse than they could ever imagine, especially when contentious child custody issues take center stage.

Because both of us were in long-term marriages with difficult partners, right where you might be now, and though we can’t undo the mistakes we made in our own lives, we learned a lot along the way these past several years that can be of great value to our clients. We often start our discovery calls by saying, "We have all of this knowledge, wisdom, and experience that we never wanted—but now we can really do something with it."

And this, along with having walked the walk, makes us good at what we do. It’s deeply rewarding to help people suffering through situations so similar to our own experiences. Our hope in writing this book is that it can become a practical roadmap to help you through your difficult journey. It is not yet another memoir of suffering through abuse (there are lots of those). We hope it serves as a friend who gets it, and that it will have a major impact on your life.

Let’s first give you some insight into our own personal stories, to show you how we got from there to here—and how you can, too. One of the things that sets us apart from others in the field is that we have both male and female perspectives. Our own histories with our exes, while vastly different, contained many parallels.

Let’s see how much of either or both of our ex-periences resonate with yours.

—Lisa and Chris

CHAPTER 1

LISA’S STORY

I was married for nearly 18 years to a man I thought was my best friend.

When we first met, I was 23, planning my return from a year of living overseas as a high school English teacher and needed to find housing. My then-boyfriend, a heavy metal rock guitarist, claimed to know a really nice guy who was kind enough to rent us an inexpensive place in Ossining, New York when we returned to the United States. I would end up marrying this man.

One of my first glimpses of him when we were dropping off the rent one day was of him reading a book in an extraordinarily messy living room. Although the carpet of papers was off-putting, I was starved for intellectual stimulation after a year in post-Communist Hungary and thrilled to speak to someone so articulate in my own language. The rental cottage, while cheap, was squalid. Porn magazines spilled out of multiple closets, and I remember thinking, What kind of person would leave that stuff lying around? not to mention, "Who would have so much of it?"

The relationship with the rock star didn’t last, and after we broke up, I moved in with my parents, as I was working in Manhattan and commuting. My former landlord asked if I wanted to have lunch sometime, and thus began a weekly ritual of platonic dates. A month passed, and he took me out to a fancy dinner and proceeded to conduct a formal interview, telling me that although women generally bored him (he often dated at least three at a time, he confessed, which I found hard to believe), I seemed like marriage material. It was a little surprising—but flattering. I had passed the test: this man, this grown-up, with a good career, who owned property and was so smart, was interested in me!

Less than a week later, he came into New York City to help me look at condos, as I wanted to be closer to my job. Don’t bother wasting your time, he said within an hour. You know you’re going to end up with me anyway. Soon enough, I found myself installed in his house, without a thought about what I actually wanted.

Hard to believe, but I was never physically attracted to him, so instead I justified the positive qualities of the relationship to myself. He was cultured, and my girlhood fantasy of having someone to read in bed with would come true. Plus, having just returned from a year of subsistence living overseas, it was comforting to know our future family would have enough money to live on.

More red flags appeared after moving in, which I ignored. Though he was the one who had insisted on an exclusive relationship as well as the new living arrangement, I often found scraps of paper with other women’s phone numbers and email addresses in plain sight. When I questioned him, he said that because he was several years older than me, he’d led the single life for so long it was hard to give up.

Other things didn’t seem to make sense. He’d claimed how rich he was in his career as a software programmer, but was perpetually out of work, and spent the bulk of his days watching coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial on illegally connected cable TV in his apartment, while eating entire cheese pizzas. When I questioned his lifestyle, he was dismissive, insisting that he was so successful that he could afford to live this way, although he constantly obsessed over not having enough money.

There were other hints that something was not right on a deeper level. With pride, he claimed that no one had ever really understood him, because he was so intellectually advanced. There had also been some kind of darkness in his past that he referred to, but insisted I was not deep enough to get it. He spent a lot of time on the computer, supposedly researching and connecting with people who did.

Our engagement dragged out for over a year, and when he finally proposed, he was furious that I wasn’t overjoyed. Two weeks after the wedding, I discovered he was having an affair, and said that I was leaving him. I was 26, we had no children, and he’d certainly had enough time to figure things out.

I didn’t want to be married to a cheater.

He broke down, begging me to stay, promising to finally see a therapist to deal with his issues, which also involved a significant amount of anger toward his dead mother, and a complicated relationship with his sister. He went to therapy for the next year and a half, saying the real issue was learning to express his needs more clearly. I thought that was the end of it, problem solved.

Fifteen years passed.

We had a generally peaceful, stable marriage and two children. He rearranged his work schedule in I.T. after the birth of our son and was one of the few dads who made being physically present a priority. He took the time to choose books at the library and spent hours reading to him daily. He did all the cooking or often took the family out to funky, ethnic restaurants and on luxurious vacations. His persona was that of a happily married man, secure in his situation.

And I flourished. I’d left my beloved teaching career for full-time motherhood by choice, grateful we could afford to live mostly on his salary. I loved being a mother, was very involved in the community, and eventually started my own online businesses in fashion and art.

For the most part, life was great. Except for the times when, out of nowhere, my husband would announce that he was unhappy in the relationship and would leave if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted sexually on a rigid schedule for several weeks at a time.

In early 2013, while he and our teenage son were cleaning out the attic, I came across some photographs of what looked like an adolescent girl, and my gut immediately told me something was wrong, really wrong. When I confronted him, after much prodding, he admitted that they’d met online weeks earlier, and that she was his soulmate. He had promised to move her from Germany to America as soon as he figured out how.

You can imagine my response. Here was a man whose judgment I’d trusted more than my own for nearly two decades. What disturbed me the most was not that he thought he was in love with someone else, but that he actually believed his own outrageous tale that a beautiful young woman less than half his age that he met on the internet would fall in love with a 50-year-old man sight unseen. He had even admitted to not considering our children’s feelings in any of this, as his only goal was to just be happy.

I knew then—immediately—that the marriage was over. You know those lightbulb moments we sometimes have? But, unlike before, we now had two children, whose lives were rooted in our community. And the possibility of spending $10,000 on a divorce was unthinkable. Instead, for the next two years, I spent that amount from our personal savings on counterproductive couples’ therapy, which made things far worse. His personal therapist from years before leapt at the opportunity to offer her services, and completely aligned with his point of view from the get-go. Multiple sessions were spent focusing on why he was so unhappy, and what I could do to fix the marriage.

This continued for months, as I simmered with resentment and hurt, being told to shelve my own feelings, and that I should be there to help him deal with the heartbreak and grief over having to end his affair.

That fall and winter were a blur of misery. I wasn’t sure how long I could live with his denial and delusion, but I was terrified at the prospect of having to uproot our children’s lives. Another therapist entered the picture, after it was revealed that instead of ending his affair nearly a year before—a caveat from the first therapist—he had flown his online soulmate to America and had holed up with her in a hotel, having unprotected sex, when I thought he was at work. All this occurred while continuing our regular marital relationship and declaring his love and devotion to me on a nightly basis.

What also emerged was that his father was an active conspirator in his deceit, financing the affair on his own credit cards to hide it from me, while actively keeping up the facade of the importance of family during weekly Sunday lunches. I was physically sick over the duplicity his family had helped orchestrate, which had been happening right under my nose or years.

Therapist #2 told my husband flat out that his denial was so deep that he would require in-patient treatment at a special clinic. So, he promptly fired her, claiming she would be personally benefiting financially. We tried once more with a third specialist, who in the first session asserted that ours was the worst case of infidelity she’d ever seen in her decades-long career. He claimed she just didn’t like him and fired her as well. All this time, no one ever mentioned the words emotional abuse or, more fittingly, narcissism. Every week, it felt like something more awful would come out, and I developed what I would later realize were the symptoms of complex PTSD. The stress of hiding our problems from the kids was making me crazy. I couldn’t sleep and barely ate. Every so often, I’d put his clothes in garbage bags and ask him to move in with his father. This always led to his proclamation that breaking up the family would tear the kids apart and be all my fault. So, he stayed in the house, living full-time in the basement. His presence was excruciating.

I had always been athletic and active but even my body started getting hurt repeatedly. One back injury was so extreme that it serendipitously resulted in my going to a gym for the first time ever. That’s when things started to change for the better. Recognizing that I had no one to turn to for love, I threw myself into fitness and developing my own social life. I also began getting back into art, making a series of horseshoe crab necklaces, which kept me occupied for many happy hours applying polyurethane on the front porch. I binge-watched the TV series Catfish to make sense of what kinds of people get involved in online fantasy relationships and began to educate myself on addiction. And I finally got my own therapist specializing in trauma.

More months passed, and I began getting my center back. The marriage, however, became even more unbearable. He kept claiming how miserable and selfish I was for not being able to simply forgive and forget, saying he was going to leave me, but always refusing to move out. It felt like my marriage had been over for years when the day finally came that I was just done. I was able to get him to move out after two years because I realized it was more painful for me to try keep the family intact, and I met with an attorney who advised me to file for divorce as soon