How long does it take to recover from betrayal? The guy I thought I was going to marry was emotionally abusing me hot and cold, resenting me from a drunk outburst I had. The behavior made me do some digging and found out he had a wife and 2 kids all along. His other ex who left him because of this sent me screenshots of him telling her I was maybe a rebound and he didn’t want to be alone and he loves her. Right before our breakup he was telling me he never loved anyone as much as me. Then he would randomly lash out and remember the past and want to break up. It’s a pattern that happened for months now. Despite everything, my self esteem is so down and I still love this guy. I know it’s over now but I’m still in denial and feel so alone and lost. I lost my job and got so dependent and attached to him and he flew me home to see my family. I found out while here and was going to go back to him in Dubai when the summer was over. A week has went by and I’m still depressed and crying. Even when he officially broke up he turned it around and blamed me for the past and said I held on and begged for nothing all this time. So all his I love yous were just fake. I don’t know what’s real anymore. I can never trust anyone again.

-Partner and I are still together since I found out 1 year ago. -he has been actively working on himself and has gotten therapy, and really doing well. Has done everything I’ve asked, and he’s a better person from therapy -OCD has flared from this trauma -we have been in couples therapy, and I’m in individual. -lately have been struggling with the feeling of just not feeling like enough, insecure, and needing constant validation that he loves me I’m really just trying to seek support from others who have been through similar, and are still in the relationship. Please don’t be rude. You really don’t know what it’s like until it happens to you. I said before it happened to me I would leave anyone that did that, and you really just don’t know until you experience it.

My husband told me recently he was going to hang out with a local friend he often goes to see. It got very late and I heard nothing from him. Tried calling and texting. Stayed up all night thinking maybe he was dead or injured. Logged into our cell phone account to see if I could find any recent location and discovered he had talked to someone on the phone that night but he was like 2 hours away from home at that time. And also saw a phone number he was spending hours on the phone with every day. I had been confronting him about his secrecy prior to that and he kept telling me it was this friend or that friend, or he was just taking the dog on a long walk or having a fire out back. He finally called me back in the morning and I yelled at him. He told me he was randomly with two friends from longer ago and had gotten drunk and passed out, and hadn't told me about these plans because I had a heart surgery a few weeks prior and health concerns and he didn't want to stress me out. He told me the phone number was a girl that he related to on trauma factors and that he views like a little sister. He said he didn't tell me because he was caught up in his trauma spilling of events he didn't share with a single person since they occurred to him 35 years ago, due to feelings of shame and anger, and that he thought I would view it as emotional cheating. I told him it really could be viewed as emotional cheating and in principle, honesty shouldn't be dependent upon the outcome... lying isn't justified because I would be upset by the truth. Since then, he's been more open with me and tells me when that girl is calling, talks to me about their conversations, answers her calls when I'm present. I talked to him about boundaries and things I'm uncomfortable with or bothered by and he changes those things. Especially because I have trauma from an emotionally abusive ex, having him lie to me when I directly questioned him about what I was perceiving or experiencing and telling me those experiences weren't real, when they actually WERE real, has really messed me up. Now when he wants to hang out with a friend, I don't trust it. But I'm handling these feelings in destructive OCD ways. I spend literally the entire time he's gone thinking and thinking and thinking about what if he's lying or what he might be doing instead of what he said. I call and text him intermittently and feel like all of my obsessive thoughts are confirmed if he doesn't answer right away. I'm always checking the phone history. The driving toll history. Scrutinizing everything. I cannot get out of this mindset. It's like this horrible mixture of emotional flashbacks and OCD. I don't want to live like this. I want to work on my relationship in productive ways. I want to be able to use my own time while my husband is gone. Even if he lied to me and is somewhere other than he said, I don't want to lie in bed just thinking and thinking and thinking for entire days and nights. I'm not sure what I'm really asking here. This is just the only place where I feel like I can share this without people thinking "wow she's crazy".

My ex just told me I’m a narcissist and I haven’t stopped thinking about it for days now. He broke up with me for the 7th and final time now and I did have an avoidance compulsion but I don’t think it was all ocd because he would continuously make poor choices and I was feeling used by the end of the relationship. However I was still trying to convince myself it would get better and it’s just a rough patch we’ll get through eventually. I blamed my ocd because I didn’t want to give up on him and I feel like maybe I was just in denial that it wasn’t meant to be but I also wanted out for a while now. I felt guilty for feeling relieved when he broke up with me but it was a civil conversation and it seemed like we were ending on good terms. But now he’s telling everyone that I’m a narcissist and I abused him emotionally and I was controlling when I let this man do WHATEVER he wanted. I’m controlling because I said I wanted to do his hair because I’m literally a stylist. He said I’m just like my mother and I’m a sh*tty person. He sent me a long paragraph of why I’m worse than all of his exes and that I’m a bad mother days after we broke up. I know I should’ve handled the situation differently but I don’t think that should ruin me as a person. He also said he no longer believes what the men in my past did to me because I’m a narcissist so that means I’m a liar. Knowing one of my biggest fears is becoming the people who hurt me. Part of me feels like he knew this was an obsession of mine and used it against me. I really feel like the worst person alive right now. Like Hitler level evil. I normally don’t post much but this is ruining me right now and I don’t know who else to turn to. I’m out of options and I’m really just helpless right now.