Dreams where he is nice to me

[pasta]

I dreamt he was so nice to me and that I was happy with him and we has all that passion and intensity again, which I miss. I somehow knew he also wasn’t nice and that it might end but I kept clinging on. I felt so content but also unsettled underneath.

As embarrassing as it sounds I worry that if he did come to try and get me back I don’t know how I’d react. He was the one that ended it, not me and at the time I begged for him to stay with me. I only gave up because he stopped responding.

I’m with someone else now who I know is so much better.
But I sometimes miss the intensity I had with him.

I wonder if I have grieved the relationship properly and let myself miss it and feel let down. At the time I just had to keep telling myself it was abusive, but it was still a relationship where I loved him and was sad it ended.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar or can offer any comfort?

[KIP.]

Google trauma bonding. It took me two years of total no contact before I could confidently say I would never have him back but even now I have this awful feeling that if he got near me he could manipulate me again. I used to call him Rasputin! What he did to me was beyond cruel and the police and courts were involved but that’s the depth of abuse that even years later we still doubt ourselves x

[pasta]

Thanks Kip. I have read about trauma bonding before but perhaps I should read more again. I thought I had broken it but maybe not. How do I get rid of that bond then?

[SunshineRainflower]

Hi Pasta,

I can really relate to your post. You wrote:

I felt so content but also unsettled underneath.

and I really felt so similar to this in my relationship, it is very confusing. Lately I have struggled with crying a lot, thinking about him all the time and missing him. Yet I also can see he was abusive, and that I am actually very scared of him, and occasionally still think ‘what if he is stalking me, what if he finds out where I live now and turns up.’ It is very confusing to miss the person who hurt you so badly and who you fear, but it seems to be common with abuse survivors, like Kip said due to the trauma bonding.

I keep thinking of all the little things I enjoyed with him, especially early on, like how he always made us nice breakfasts, and how he had a lot of time for me, his lovely house, our early walks together in the countryside. It all felt so wonderful, cosy, special, exciting and hopeful after years on my own. Every weekend he would do or say something that at the time I wrote off as ‘out of character’ and I kept blaming the anxiety and depression I felt on my own mental health, which he kept blaming too. It was only right at the end when he became sort of crazy and scary when I googled his behaviour and rang the helpline that I realised the relationship was abusive and that I wasn’t actually safe with him and to my horror, that all of the ‘out of character’ behaviour was actually his mask slipping, revealing the real him underneath. It was so strange and disorientating when the helpline told me to ring the police if he turned up, it felt almost laughable, why would I ring the police on my ‘lovely boyfriend.’

I think the mask they wear and the manipulation really penetrate deep into our psyche, because they use mind control and hypnosis techniques to a certain extent, so long after we realise they are abusers, we still struggle to shake off the affection we felt for the man we met at the beginning, even though we logically know it was sadly all false. It all just feels incredibly sad. Like you said, you really do have to mourn and grieve for the loss of the man you cared for. I am very much in that process now.

Have you had any counselling for what you went through? There are some really good books out there too, (detail removed by moderator) is very good (if you feel your ex was (detail removed by moderator), if you do a search in amazon a lot will come up. I have been reading through them steadily and find they help me feel calmer and less confused. And I am on a waiting list for counselling. Just make sure with counsellors you get an abuse-trained one because I had one that didn’t understand abuse and I felt like she was defending my ex which felt awful so I had to stop seeing her.

[iwillbeok]

Hi pasta,

Following a particularly ‘heavy’ counselling session I had dreams of him being ‘nice’. These dreams were weird in that they were clearly post getting back together (never happened in real life), and he was being very calm and helpful. The difference was I recognised in the dream that this was just the ‘nice’ phase. In the dream I knew he was abusive (something I didn’t realise in real life until some time after I had him arrested for sexual assault). I could also feel the unsettled feeling in my gut. I think at this point this dream represents my mind/heart trying to merge the ‘nice’ him and the abusive him into the one person. This seems to be my sticking point…

I have come a long, long way in my counselling but there is still a ways to go in order to accept what he really was beneath the mask, that mask was there before I even met him, and that my behaviours in our marriage were the direct result of his abuses (I changed my values and boundaries in order to survive) and were not my fault. If you can find a counsellor that you can work with, they are really invaluable in this journey of healing and forgiving ourselves.

xx
iwillbeok

[Author]

Posts