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I’m hearing new perspectives today which are really shaking me to my core.

Namely that PTSD isn’t necessarily about experiencing trauma, it’s about experiencing trauma at the hands of someone who is pure evil, purely malevolent.

Soldiers that come back from war don’t always have PTSD due to what they witnessed, they have it because of what they DID, of who they became in those circumstances or witnessing people becoming compliant to the evil and participating. They have a splintered sense of self and their world view has been flipped on its head. You have seen evil. Whether it’s inside of yourself or in someone else, you have seen evil for the first time and it just breaks you in half. It’s just that horrible.

You can be traumatized by an accident, a natural disaster, a disease, a tragedy… but if you are traumatized by EVIL, it causes PTSD.

You carry with you your own worldview, your sense of life, your core belief systems and who you are on this stage. These are the axioms of your life. If someone hurts you SO badly and they did so malevolently, your internal compass explodes. The beliefs that made you feel anchored in life suddenly don’t work anymore. You go from coasting along in your life to not knowing how the world works, what is real, who you can trust… and you feel that you can’t even trust yourself. Your world falls apart. It’s existential rupture.

In other words, evil exists, and it found me.

My radar failed. My kindness didn’t save me. My intuition missed this. I don’t trust people, I don’t trust me. I don’t trust life.

And we’ve heard about evil, we grew up knowing about Hell, Lucifer etc. But the difference here is knowing about evil, then experiencing it.

Just like watching those very disturbing videos showing a home invasion. The people being robbed can’t move. They freeze and can’t move at all. They may even wet themselves, they are so scared. And you tell yourself, I would absolutely jump into action, I know my instincts would kick in and save me. How do you know that if you’ve never been in a situation like that? How could you possibly know how you’d react if you’ve never encountered a fear like that before?

Encountering evil is the same thing. You don’t know how you’d react until it is standing next to you, whispering threats into your ear.

It’s an entirely different ball game.

So, you can imagine that good and evil exists. You can conjure up little images in your mind, but until you experience pure evil, you didn’t truly realize that evil actually existed. And the moment that you do? A sweet little psychically naive mind like mine was absolutely not equipped to handle it. You think the world is basically all good and evil is just something you’ll never encounter or it’s just someone having a bad day. You lack the conceptual apparatus to match the actual event (terror) with the expected outcome (goodness). And the more Pollyanna you are, the harder the PTSD hits you. If you are more aware of evil and can conceptualize it, the PTSD isn’t as bad. Which is absolutely fascinating.

So in order to understand and integrate malevolent evil into your language is to separate out the evil from the good. So that the trust in the good can remain stable or be regained. And I have NO CLUE how to do this.

I made everything a big soup after my encounter. All is evil, nobody and nothing can be trusted, and now I’m glued to my couch.

I thought I had just gone through a narcissistic discard encounter. Maybe he was malignant. It was harsh and I encountered a harsh aftermath. But now I’m realizing it was SO MUCH worse than I had previously imagined. It wasn’t just a discard, it was a dance with evil.

Here’s what happened after he discarded me:

• Two panic attacks. One hospitalization for a severe panic attack, a first in my life. I felt so disassociated, like I was walking 8 feet above my body. It was terrifying. And this happened a few days after the discard.
• Going on Lexapro.
• Not leaving my house.
• Not trusting anyone anymore. People aren’t who they have presented themselves to be. I can’t trust any of it.
• Not trusting myself.
• Loss of trust in my own perception. I no longer believe I can tell what or who is safe anymore.
• The world doesn’t feel real anymore and I don’t belong here.
• Deep shame. Believing that I deserved it. I must have attracted it. I must be evil, too.
• Loss in functioning. In my interests, I’m tired all the time, I’ve withdrawn, socially and I have a loss of purpose.
• I had a sense that something dark passed through me and I can’t shake it.
• I’d have flashbacks of all the times we had sex. I would cringe and cry and get really upset. I couldn’t distance myself from remembering the times he had physically used me at my most vulnerable. It feels like pure hell replaying over and over again.

This has been more than depression, more than recovering from narcissistic abuse. This has felt like an existential shift, like gazing into the abyss. I saw evil, it sees me, too…. it wanted to touch me and change me and fuck with me. I didn’t just look into the darkness, it looked back at me and shook me to my core.

I need to recall the event to convey how bad it was. The night my ex told me that he was done with me:

• It was 1am and we were in our driveway, which was dark because he failed to change the lightbulbs on the garage lights. We back up to woods, they are very dark, there aren’t any houses on one full side, just woods and darkness. I was there to pick up the dog. He wouldn’t let me in the house. So imagine a huge house, woods, a driveway and this is all lit by one 25 watt candelabra bulb.
• My whole body was on high alert. I did not feel safe. I wanted to run.
• He whispered at me in a sinister tone. He kept trying to get close so he could whisper.
• His body language was off-putting. He was acting so rehearsed and cold. He was smirking. He had a smile on his face the whole time and hands in his jean pockets.
• The exchange felt sadistic and planned. Like he spent time figuring out how to scare me.
• I actually ran to my car and left mid-sentence. I was so scared of my ex of 23 years in that moment and I can’t even convey what was going on in my body. Every cell was screaming at me to get out of there. And I gave this man my life, my body, I almost carried his child. And in this moment, boom, I never wanted to be alone with him again, let alone see him again. He scared me SO BAD that I thought I may have to move to a different state and scrub my whole identity. Everyone told me he couldn’t hurt a fly, but they didn’t encounter this version of him. I believe he wanted to scare me and he read about how to do it or he just knew. Pure instincts told me to get out of there. (And I went hiking with a boy in high school that ended up murdering his mother! He was creepy and I felt that, but it wasn’t as creepy as this encounter… call me hysterical, call me dramatic but I’d like to think my body can feel a predator, especially if they are pointing their anger at me).
• I’ve seen him get off on the idea that his calm discard would fuck with them. I’ve seen him do this a few times in 23 years with other people. I NEVER thought he’d do this to me.
• When I went back to the house to clean it for an estimate (which took me a whole week) I felt like the house had evil energy. I had to open all the windows and blast happy music and I couldn’t be there at night. It felt SO SCARY to be in my old house. I can’t even explain it. The books he was reading, what was strewn about, the way the house smelled, the way it was neglected… his energy was evil. It felt like walking into the home of a serial killer. You know what I’m saying. It had an energy of dread, doom, sadness, anger and chaos. That’s how my beautiful house felt. And I cried and mourned her and apologized to her as I cleaned her for the last time.

Malevolence is when someone (you trusted previously):

• Wants to cause you harm.
• Does it in a calculated, precise way.
• Has immoral strategic thinking.
• Is not excessively controlling in an exploitative way. They prey on your weakness (and this is calculated).
• Is strategic in how they harm you and they may even get off on it.
• Sadistic. They enjoy the misfortune of others.
• Lack remorse.

Qualities a malevolent person always had, but maybe it wasn’t weaponized to actively hurt you:

• Lack of empathy
• Indifference
• Lack of guilt
• Persistent dishonesty
• Deception
• Appearance of Decency
• Inflated ego
• Transactional relationships
• Avoids responsibility
• rejection of criticism

Which is basically narcissism. So all of this is part of the dark triad. Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

I’ve spent my entire life believing that people are good. I trust people. I see the best in them. I branded by ex husband as on the spectrum, quirky, OCD, opinionated and “difficult”, but never evil. Maybe narcissistic, but I felt that it was manageable for the most part. I never believed he hurt me, used me or tried to control me with the intent to get his way. I just thought he was immature and would do anything to stay comfortable and have zero responsibility. This wasn’t evil in my eyes, it was just incredibly lazy and disrespectful.

The last few years, though? My opinions on that all changed.

I put down a boundary, I said no to sex and it cracked his facade. He started getting SO angry with me. And his true self, his true intent started dripping out.

At first, it was seen to me as laziness, combativeness, possibly his autism, but no… it was intentional because he needed to CONTROL me. He was showing me how much he absolutely hated me when I wasn’t serving him. He started becoming a monster. And it got worse and worse as I watched him struggle to keep his true nature under wraps. He started glaring at me and making contorted faces when I walked in the room. It was scary. It was a hint of what was to come.

Finally, at the end, when he announced that this was it, he was going to file for divorce. I saw the true him with absolute clarity and it scared the shit out of me.

He wanted to hurt me, even if it was just emotionally and spiritually. He hated me SO much that he wanted to destroy me.

Why? Because I no longer gave him what he wanted. I was no longer his servant, I was no longer his mommy. And because he’s not emotionally well to begin with, he probably obsessed on ways to hurt me. Deeply.

So, I’ve been paralyzed with fear. Trying to figure out how I attracted such an awful person, how did I not see this, how did I not know what I was attaching myself to?

I have to admit that I was a vulnerable, trusting moron and I put myself in extreme danger. I was prey.

Now my brain won’t let me sleep because it needs to figure out why I let this happen, how to spot evil before I sleep with it. Because, and this is key, my abuser picked me because I was too timid, too naive to conceptualize what he was. He knew.

I remember being on the Monorail at Disneyworld and I was drunk. I was adorably drunk. And a man leaned over and said to my ex “The key to a good marriage is to keep your wife childlike”.

And my ex smiled and nodded.

Now I’m realizing that he knew all along that I was childlike and naive, and that’s why he picked me. That encounter used to resonate as cute, but now I don’t see it that way.

I’m going to research how to emerge from this hellscape now… and talk to my therapist about it.

This is a HUGE epiphany for me. I knew I was missing a puzzle piece and I truly believe this is it.

God, let me fix this and find peace, please.