It is three years ago. Yesterday my father died after a long illness, but unexpectedly. It is a Friday, and I have taken the day off work. The psychopath will come to my parents’ house and one of his kids will say he heard my dad died and the ask what we’re going to do with dad’s chair. I will spend the evening working on halloween costumes for the psychopath and the other kid. Tomorrow or the next day I will become frustrated with the psychopath’s costume. I will announce that I can’t deal with it. I will shove everything into bags and tell him to get rid of it. He will look at me as though I’m crazy. He will take his kids and go home, thinking that I’m being unreasonable. I will be tired of holding myself together. He hasn’t offered any sympathy or said he’s sorry, and if I cry I will get the silent treatment. He doesn’t like to be around me when I’m upset or angry. I’ve known this for a long time. He will ignore me if I need or expect emotional support. I learned that at the beginning of the year.

Tomorrow the psychopath will go shopping for dress pants so he can be presentable for the funeral service, but he’ll wear my father’s dress socks because he won’t buy those. Monday will be halloween and Dad’s funeral. The psychopath will come to the funeral mass, and he will put his arm around my shoulders when his parents come into the church. His father will hug me but the psychopath won’t. He will visit with people in the hall after mass and eat the food. Later he will pick up his kids for trick-or-treating. One of them will mope because his costume wasn’t done. The attitude will irritate the psychopath and I will be a little happy about that.

The next day the psychopath will ignore the fact that Dad ever existed. He will expect everything to go back to normal. He will not understand grief or mourning, and I will have to to deal with mine when he’s not around. My brothers will be far enough away to not be able to help Mom with the autumn yard work. Mom and I will figure out how to get the lawn tractor set to pick up and bag the leaves and we will work very hard in the evenings before it gets dark. The psychopath will not show up until after dark, and he will act as though I’m neglecting him by helping Mom. He and his kids will come over one Saturday and they will grumble because they are expected to help. The psychopath  will get tired of loading and unloading the pickup  and will say he’ll have someone come and take the rest of the bagged leaves to the compost facility. The leaves will still be there in the spring. The psychopath and his kids will be fed a nice meal in exchange for their efforts, but the psychopath will believe the meal should be given whether he helps or not. He will only show up after the work is done from then on.

The next month Thanksgiving will fall on Dad’s birthday. The psychopath will spend the day sulking because he didn’t have his own food. This will be my fault even though I tell him the day before that he will need to bring the ingredients if he wants it. He will complain about having to eat turkey, about having to wait for pie, and about what we choose to have on TV. He will continue to mope because nobody feels sorry for him, and he will be offended when I tell him he can go to his family’s without me. This will be the day my family begins to despise him.

In another month the psychopath will be upset that I won’t charge all the Christmas presents, and it will not matter to him that I have been struggling to pay my bills. I will make sure his siblings’ children get gifts and I will put both our names on them so they won’t think he’s a jerk, just like I did last year when he only helped pick out one thing for one nephew and didn’t pay for anything. I will do the same thing next year when he will contribute two whole dollars. Next year he will have to buy his kids’ presents himself and he will be disappointed.

The psychopath will start moving his things out and he will leave my last text unanswered a year and a half from now. He won’t quit the job I got him for another nine months, which will be a couple months after he starts bragging about his new girl friend. Around the time he starts bragging about her I will figure out what he is. I will spend several months researching, and eventually I will understand exactly what happened. I will accept that he is a psychopath and all that that entails. I will recognise the covert abuse and I will see myself first as a victim and then as a survivor.

The psychopath, meanwhile will continue the smear campaign he began even before Dad died. He will spend at least what he owes me for his car getting the locks changed so I can’t take ‘his’ car. He will be angry that my name is on the title with his. He will quit the job I got him while bragging about the one he’ll be taking, but that won’t be real and he’ll be unemployed and still living in his parents basement. I won’t find out what he does with his 401K money. He will buy his new girlfriend a car, but that relationship will end and I will laugh about it when I hear about it. He will be mostly broke and unemployed. He will get another another girlfriend, who will buy him things and finish the halloween costume I started in time for “midevil fair”, and she’ll have my deepest sympathies because I’ll know what she’ll really be getting.

It’s October 28, 2011 and my future is a year and a half of silent treatments and emotional abuse, followed by seven months of limbo, four months of researching, reliving, and processing, and a lot of recovery. I will finish projects, reduce my debt, and make a new life without the psychopath. I will learn to count my blessings and listen to my intuition. I will take care of myself, I will heal, and I will spread awareness. I don’t know it yet, but I will.

I’ve written about the smear campaign a little bit, but I think it deserves a little more attention. The smear campaign starts before the discard, during devaluation. I wrote before that the smear campaign started no later than halfway through the fifth and final year. A couple months ago I realized that it started much earlier, and that he’d only ramped it up during the last six months.

We met in the spring of 2008, and were engaged after about a year and a half. The incident I recalled a couple months ago took place in the fall of 2009 or the spring of 2010, while the relationship didn’t end until the spring of 2013. What I remembered was a conversation with the psychopath’s son, who told me that he and his father and brother weren’t ever going to live at my house. When I asked him why he said that, he said his father told him so. He went on to tell me his father said that I was only using him because I needed him to finish the house, and when it was done I would kick them all out. I told the kid it wasn’t true and that I didn’t need his father to finish the house because I could do it myself. I didn’t think any more about it until recently. So, he started covertly, and I’m sure there were many things that weren’t repeated to me over the next few years, little digs at me when talking to other people, laying the groundwork so his future slander would be believable.

The smear campaign covers a lot of territory.

According to the psychopath, I’m crazy, which I understand is a very popular choice for a smear. It is with him, there’s at least one other crazy one who seems perfectly normal. People who don’t buy into his bullshit or see things his way get labels like crazy, unbalanced, jealous, dumb, annoying, or ‘so dramatic’. Those are some of the words he used to describe his exes and some of his family members.

I’m also the reason he had no money, because he spent all his on me and my house. I know he’s said I owe him money, which is his projection. The truth would be that I spent all kinds of money on him and his kids, loaned him money he refuses to repay, and borrowed money to loan him that he refuses to repay. He blames everyone but himself for not having any money. When we were together he blamed his ex because he had to pay child support, and his boss for not giving him a raise. Now, he did buy some things for my house, but it was a “see what an awesome Valentine’s day present I got you?” kind of gift. He told everyone how awesome he was for months after. Half of the stuff ended up siting in the boxes because he wasn’t interested in helping to install it. At the beginning of this year I got an invoice demanding payment for $20/hour, 40 hours/week, for four years as “proof” that I owe him instead of the other way around.

He’s said I kicked him out, when he had been sneaking his things out of the house for weeks, without saying anything to me, before I changed the locks. I did threaten to kick him out if he didn’t pay the water bill, and also when he wanted to quit his job so he could “have more money”, but no, I didn’t kick him out. That’s a pity-play. His parents were more likely to take him back full-time if he was kicked out.

He said I was mean to his kids, which is his way of saying I treated them as I do my own. I happen to believe children should have boundaries, rules, and consequences. There’s an article over at Heartless Bitches International, How to Create an Evil Stepmother, that includes some of his tactics.

He’s hinted that I lied to him and cheated on him. This is projection for the lies, since he’s a pathological liar. The cheating is either projection (I don’t have proof, only suspicions based on his behavior) or outright fabrication. I’m not the one who kept texting “my brother” when we were supposed to be spending time together, and I’m not the one who started being secretive with the cell phone, either.

I’m sure there’s something about wanting to take HIS truck away, which would have to do with my name being on the title with his and my refusal to give him my keys. I co-signed for it and he still owes me for the down payment. The keys and my name on the title were perfectly acceptable conditions before the relationship ended. He probably spent more than what he owes me for the down payment getting the locks, etc. changed, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still legally half mine.

There’s probably something about keeping HIS dog, which would be the dog that he left and never, in the nine months we still worked together, asked about. He moved home to his parents’ basement without making a plan for the dog, so it must be my fault, right? Oh, yes, because I ‘kicked him out’. He couldn’t afford to help with the veterinary bills or buying food for the dog, he made that quite clear for two years. That was probably because he was spending all his money on me. It’s strange though, once he unloaded me as the huge financial burden, he stayed in the basement.

I think he’s probably also said that my house was his, or at least ‘ours’, since I know he told at least one person that ‘we got a house that we’re fixing up’. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t around when I signed the closing papers in 1993, but then I’m totally selfish like that. I wouldn’t be just selfish (along with crazy) though, I’m sure I’m needy, controlling, deceitful, lazy, and a few other adjectives to go with his projections.

Speaking of projection, he must have said I’m a stalker, too, since he spent all those months driving by my house, and my mother’s house, to see where I was. Then there was the eavesdropping on my conversations at work, his alternate facebook account, and going through my mailbox for months after I told him to change his mailing address. Here’s an interesting tidbit: If you write ‘the idiot moved’ along with ‘return to sender’ on the mail before dropping it into the system, the post office starts sending it back automatically. Maybe it’s just our little local office, but it’s a nice value-added service.

The things I said I know about the smear campaign were suspicions that have been confirmed. The rest are unconfirmed suspicions based on my knowledge of the psychopath, his traits, his behavior during devaluation, and his statements about others. He’s a pathological liar. He projects, he blames, he seeks pity, and he plays the victim. It wasn’t hard to figure out the kind of things he’d say.

By the time I found out about the smear campaign it was already too late to do anything about it, which is typical. The psychopath had been spewing slander for a long time, and he’s still at it. I didn’t realize there was a smear campaign until months after the breakup. How likely was I to be believed, going around and telling people the truth after all that time? Not very. That’s just the equivalent of a little kid saying “no, I didn’t!” after being ratted out by some other little kid. It’s too late. He got there first, and the delay in trying to counter his lies would make me sound like I was guilty, or I would sound like the crazy, bitter ex trying to get even. Once a piece of information, true or not, gets into a person’s mind, it’s not easy to change or replace it. People are busy, and they don’t want to have to sort out what’s true. Most people don’t want any extra drama and they don’t want anyone rocking the boat.

It was tempting to take the smear campaign personally, after all it’s really irritating to know that there are people, some who don’t even know me, who think I’m a horrible person because of the smear campaign. The thing is, though, it’s not about me and it never was. It wasn’t about me when we met, when he proposed, when he devalued me, or when he discarded me, so it’s certainly not about me now. It was about him the entire time and what he could get or use. That’s how it will be for the next victim, too, and his friends, and his family.