The Men In My Life: Love, Betrayal, and Injustice

By Grace Giadono

Grace Giadono has written an autobiography about herself to teach what she wished she had learned.

Grace is a woman who is smart, attractive, and perfect in almost every way. But from birth, nearly all of the family, friends, and lovers who surround her have serious mental disorders. This leads her to become interested in psychology so she can figure out what makes people tick.

In spite of earning an advanced degree in psychology and starting her own private practice, Grace is drawn to toxic relationships with dangerously disturbed men. Although they subject Grace and her children to many years of severe mental, emotional, and physical abuse, she marries two of them and lets another live in her ranch basement floor.

The Men in My Life is the story of a woman who learned to deal with life the hard way. From having a loving husband and starting a family to dealing with the same person's Bipolar personality can be a difficult challenge to cope with. In this story, Grace deals with the physical abuse from her husband, Ned.

In the meantime, she also faces trouble handling her child Tripp, who was sent in the military only to become rogue. A series of unfortunate events leads to Grace being involved in an accident that not only causes her a physical injury but, consequently, takes her son away from her. The matter immediately gets dragged to the court where havoc ensues.

While enduring and seeking remedies for her trials of the heart, Grace finds answers and comfort in religious, spiritual, and therapeutic disciplines. Gnostic concepts which Carl Jung, the great psychologist, wanted to introduce as a part of everyday life through his psychology are included as part of the heroine's everyday life.

The story is as unconventional as Grace herself. Will she ever recognize what's really the common denominator in all the crises of her life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781636929071

Book preview

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The Men In My Life

Love, Betrayal, and Injustice

Grace Giadono

Copyright © 2021 Grace Giadono

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-63692-906-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-907-1 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Lodger Who Shagged Me

Grace’s Story: Little Girl Lost

The Man from Mars

Boys and Girls Have Parts That Go Together

Dr. Smellyfish

Links in Your Chain

He’s The One

Train Wreck

True Love and the Killer in the Basement

Tripp and the Perfect Storm

Justice Denied

The Future Silver Lining

To my children, who inspire me

Chapter 1

The Lodger Who Shagged Me

You never really know someone until you live with them. Even though Grace and Matt had dated for three years, it wasn’t until Matt moved into Grace’s house that her suspicions were confirmed—Matt wasn’t just a fun-loving, manicky (a word Grace used to describe him and his temperament occasionally), over-the-top, likable, dapper guy. He was a full-blown, histrionic, raging, narcissistic sociopath.

Although he had owned a conspicuously large house in an elite neighborhood, when he moved in with Grace, Matt brought with him almost nothing but roomfuls of clothing—thousands of ties, shirts, pants, socks, and athletic wear befitting the likes of a Hollywood celebrity—and oh, lots of photos of himself with various family members, co-athletes, and buddies.

Exorbitant shopping and overspending are typical of people with Bipolar Disorder, with which Matt had been recently diagnosed. He, at Grace’s urging, agreed to address this with medication. She was not going to forget his cheating episode, which had caused them to break up before. His lavish retail therapy and infidelity are typical behaviors which trigger people with Bipolar to release their positive mood-enhancing neurotransmitters. It helps them to overcome the underlying Major Depression because it releases their inner cocktail of euphoric juices. They don’t need to go to a bar for a drink. They conjure up their own adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters, the unbalanced high-intensity brain chemicals. To the Bipolar mind, it’s a quick fix to temporarily combat the underlying severe depressive condition which afflicts them. They have learned that by putting their running shoes on, as Matt put it, dashing into some manic frenzy, and chasing their shiny pot of gold with deranged glee and excitement, they can feel better, often with no thinking involved about the consequences to themselves or others (most serial killers get high on their own euphoric juices or real-life substances), causing the frenzied imbalance of neurotransmitters.

Immaturely chasing something shiny like a new garment or hunting prey (women), as Matt succinctly put it, reduces the pain or depression.

When Matt moved in with all his stuff, Grace could see that he needed more than a chest of drawers and part of her closet. He would require a room of his own, devoted to his decadent and self-indulgent wardrobe. Hence, another full bedroom was converted into a walk-in closet, costing Grace a pretty penny for rods, racks, bins, and such to hang, shelve, and display his grandiose assortment of clothing.

Matt’s contribution to the organization was to insist that the tall racks go in front of the large windows. Then, he would complain the room was too dark, never seeming to understand that blocking the window caused less light in the room (this came from a man with a genius IQ of 140).

People with Bipolar don’t like to think. They need to act to feel good. They have to keep moving and keep it simple. Like a postal worker pulling the mail from the mail slots quickly, the person with Bipolar has an internal mental cupboard of slots with fixed ideas they pick from and then fit into the situation at hand. In this case, one of Matt’s ideas was—since this house was actually owned by Grace, not him—that he was merely a (self-proclaimed) lodger or renter with no control over anything. In other words, a victim. So the poor man was stuck with a dark room.

Luckily for Grace, prior to becoming a psychologist, she had worked in retail sales through high school and college, so she was used to unloading and putting away merchandise. Because Matt continued to shop excessively, she took a part-time job in retail at low pay for the first three years of their marriage. The man never needed to buy himself another piece of clothing for the rest of his life.

Grace was the opposite—a typically nice, extremely loyal person who hooks up with narcissists or sociopaths. Once when she had a psychic reading, the lady asked Grace why her own closet was full of old clothes. Grace looked okay because she was attractive and smart at shopping at thrift stores.

Her son, Tripp, a product of Grace’s marriage before Matt, was six when he once asked her a funny question when she handed him a clean white T-shirt—his favorite for bed because, It was more cooling being white, he said, with the thinking of a six-year-old.

Don’t we use the dirty ones to sleep in and wear the clean ones for day?

Frugal Grace kept marginally stained T-shirts for nightwear to save money, so Little Tripp assumed he was sleeping in dirty T-shirts.

Yes, Matt and Grace proved the saying Opposites attract. Matt, a public relations man, had had many manicures over the years to look appealing to customers whereas Grace preferred to send her monthly $24 to a Christian children’s fund to save a child.

Opposites also attract when it comes to personality disorders. People with dependency, diagnosed as having loyal/dependent tendencies and a compulsive/responsible nature and low self-esteem, often wind up partnering with a person who has narcissistic or sociopathic personality traits.

Most psychologists like Grace, and counselors of any type, are originally drawn to helping professions either to uncover or help their own psychological issues or to understand or fix their family-of-origin problems.

In Grace’s case, the latter was true. But she also had dependent compulsive fixer and codependent tendencies, and she wasn’t afraid that she couldn’t handle Matt.

Pheromones are the sex scent in a person’s saliva. Why did Grace and Matt click? Their pheromones matched. Meeting outside on the stairs at a church event, after having noticing this larger-than-life character at several previous events, Grace decided to acknowledge him; and he immediately flew over to her to introduce himself with a hug and a kiss—which was typical at this progressive church. What were unusual were his lips. Liking the pheromones, he double-dipped and kissed her again!

Their stars were aligned. Grace was ripe for romance. And since her regular astrologer psychic mentor had become recently unavailable while taking care of her husband who’d developed dementia, Grace was left to her own devices. She attended monthly meetings at the local chapter of the National Council for Geocosmic Research, which was started by astrophysicists and astronomers when they could not disprove astrology and began advanced research in it. She read hers and Matt’s synastry—their personal natal charts’ compatibility—and thought theirs was a perfect match. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Since that day, Grace and Matt became inseparable—dancing and networking and attending many spiritual and personal development workshops. They even founded and ran their own nonprofit healing center to educate others in cognitive-behavioral strategy—change your thoughts, change your lives—meditation, and healthy eating through speakers and group activities. These were positives in their relationship from Grace’s perspective.

Little did she know, however, that putting up with her husband’s hobby of excessive shopping required constant effort on her part to keep the house from looking like a hoarder’s nest. She regularly sorted the clothes, giving away—always with his permission—loads of them to family and Goodwill. She even began encouraging him to use his shopping frenzy to buy her clothes, which turned her into a fashionista to match him because he had very good taste.

Yet unbeknownst to Grace, his shopping obsession had reached dangerous proportions, which explained why he had to head out to the same store to buy nuts (again?) several times a week. Something darker lurked; shoplifting had become an addiction, a thing he craved.

Until he got caught. What precipitated this and how Grace found out were literally acts of God as fantastic as his manic behavior. They make for a story of mystery unto itself.

Grace was committed to the clinical path of the great psychologist Carl Jung, who vowed to bring spirituality into psychology. This represented a split from his mentor and colleague, Sigmund Freud, who focused on material determinism. During their explorations, Grace and Matt had found out about Gnosis, which Jung followed. Gnosis is the wisdom and spirituality of all religions, and it was offered at a church in their city. Gnosis, which means self-knowledge or divine self-knowledge, was all about wisdom and spirituality, what Jesus told his apostles; but it was not included in the Bible for the masses. The knowledge stemmed from Jesus’s personal spirituality and knowledge he had gained during his mystery years when he traveled around the Far East, such as with the Essenes in the Qumran. So Jesus’s Christians, Gnostic Christianity, got fused with Buddhism, Kabala, and all the