A relationship with a psychophage. ‘He never hit me. He had other methods’.

Knowledge is key. It took me too long to understand what I was stuck in. I was in a relationship with a narcissist, toxic sociopath for almost 18 years. You can call it whatever you like. For me, the most appropriate term is psychophage, or soul thief. It is a person who takes away a part of you. Had I known the mechanisms, I probably would have managed to free myself sooner. When someone blows your nose, you know it. And I could not have known. He never hit me. I was convinced there was something wrong with me. I apologised to him for my emotions, my reactions. It is like having a disease. Only when you are aware of what you are up against can you begin to heal. I am in recovery and have a strong urge to help others in a similar situation to mine. That is why I set up the website surwiwalka.pl. It is meant to be a guide, a place to find knowledge in a nutshell. Because that was one of my problems – I had to search for a long time for different information. I want to cooperate with psychologists and lawyers so that women in crisis who write to me can benefit not only from knowledge but also from professional support. If you have inadequate representation in court, are unfamiliar with the subject of personality disorders, they will not be able to help you. They will tell you not to cause drama. I know, because it happened to me. People are quick to downplay the problem.

Living with a psychophage does not happen once in a thousand cases. And people who are in such relationships need tools to get out of them.

Idealisation

2004. I was 26 years old, had a good job and a nice car. I bought a flat in the city centre. I was just settling in when the intercom rang. They were recent acquaintances and said they wanted to introduce me to someone. I, scrubbing something in yellow gloves, and standing before me them and – as it turned out later – a guy 11 years older than me. I invited them for tea.

Radek and I exchanged numbers and started texting. I fell into it very quickly. For our first date he took me to Kołobrzeg. He came in a big car, back then a jeep like that was like ‘wow’. He bombarded me with texts, he called me. He gave me the feeling that I was the only one who mattered. He reiterated that we were halves who had found each other, that we understood the world in the same way. Every denominator was common. Only later did I realise that the psychophage was a mirror. First, he phishes for information and finds out what you dream of, and then he puts on exactly the suit you want to see him in and says: ‘Here I am’. That’s why it’s so perfect – because he becomes who you want him to be.

When I went into it with my whole self, when I told him about my whole life, the bright and the dark sides, he began to destroy me.

Devaluation

I gave up everything for him. He made me dependent on him. He repeated: ‘your psycho mother’, ‘crazy friends’, so I turned away from them because I believed him implicitly. I studied law externally. Before each exam session, he stated, ‘You are off to get fucked again’. Eventually, after the fourth year, I dropped out of university. I started to lose my self-esteem.

He loved to say that I was being dramatic, hysterical, and over-sensitive. His favourite slogan was: ‘Turn those complicators off’. And I absorbed it all and took it head on. I blamed myself for all the failures of our relationship. It’s called gaslighting – your partner has been telling you for so long there is something wrong with you that you start believing it.

He would often provoke me. For example, at a party he got a text from an ex and laughed: ‘I think she still loves me. What are you so hysterical about? These are not normal reactions’. And everyone in the company looked at me.

I thought of myself as a latchkey girl. These latches were all my faults, everything Radek had accused me of. I began to write down my experiences under the pseudonym ‘The Girl with the Latches’. When I read those notes now, 15 years later, I see despair and a feeling that we should not be together. There is longing mixed with exhaustion and self-loathing.

Rejection

In 2007 we were to go to the Alps. I excitedly bought a ski jacket with my parents. I was already packed when suddenly Radek called and said: ‘You are not going’. I screamed, I cried, I thrashed around the flat like a lioness in a cage. And he was still texting during his trip: ‘What’s up, honey?’, ‘I love you’. I was happy to have earned his attention again.

He lived a street away. Almost from the beginning of our acquaintance, he said that we had to move in together as soon as possible, that it was a waste of time. But at the same time he did nothing to put this plan into practice. I went to see him, stayed for a few days, but it was enough for him to say: ‘Get back to your place’, and I humbly packed my make-up bag and walked home with it. When I asked why he was chasing me out, he only replied: ‘Stop the drama’.

For someone who has not experienced this, it is probably difficult to understand – that you can allow yourself to be humiliated in this way. I do not believe it myself. It is as if I had no dignity at all.

Hoovering

I wrote letters to Radek that I never gave him. I have them all to this day, arranged in a folder. There is a lot of regret here that he treats me like a sex object rather than a life partner. Besides, it’s like floundering – one minute I’m apologising to him, the next I’m reproaching him for hurting me, and I doubt that things will ever be right between us. April 2005: ‘I owe you an apology. More than that, I want to apologise to you. For lack of humility, for my bad temper and, above all, for my arrogance’. October 2005: ‘Too many bad things have happened, too many words spoken to try to pretend it’ll work out’. September 2006: ‘I cannot function in the relationship option you offer. (...) It is more peaceful when you are not there – I live my own life, I have other issues than your rejection’. March 2007: ‘You are destroying me and taking the best years of my life’.

I also kept a letter from a neighbour. ‘You’re naive with this joy and pride that you’ve got some scraps from another woman’, she started. Between one rejection of me and before another return he had an affair with her, they didn’t hide it at all. She wrote after they had ended the relationship. She was glad she had figured out so quickly who she was dealing with. And although the letter is unkind and there is a lot of contempt in it, it also tried to warn me a little. She repeated what he had said about me, stressing that he did not respect me. And she attached a picture of Radek with her knickers on his head.

Of course, I forgave him for sleeping with her, as he again began to spread visions of a beautiful future and assure me of his feelings. There have been many such partings and returns, I cannot count them all. And there was never a pattern. When he dumped me, we were apart for six months. And just when I thought I was getting over him, that I was getting myself and my friends back, suddenly everything fell apart. He would start texting as if nothing had happened and the whole spiral would start up again. Then I found out it’s called hoovering – he pulls you back in when he sees you slipping out of his grasp. And you start believing that it will work out, because again, for a while, he is a kind guy.

After a few months passed, I started to feel good and look better. I went with friends to Świnoujście. It was probably the most wonderful trip of my life. I don’t know how Radek found out I was there. He offered to join us. Everyone was angry that I agreed, but I was already being drawn back in. I thought: maybe now we will make it.

Gradually he began to incapacitate me. He suggested, for example, that I register my phone number to his company. I said, ‘Why not? He’ll be able to write it off his costs’. It was a very cool number, easy to remember. When we finally separated, I was no longer entitled to it. He took over my card, and when someone called, he told me the phone had been taken from me for debt. This was happening at the time as I set up my business.

Of course my parents tried to save me. But every time I recovered, Radek sucked me in anew. In the end, my mother presented an ultimatum: ‘It’s either him or me’. I don’t need to say what I chose.

His influence on my life extended for many years after the breakup. I only cut it off when I had to fight for the child.

Yes, we have a daughter together. In 2007 I thought I had walked away from him, and a year later we were getting married.

Pola

We bought a house, decorated it, and tried to have a baby. But once I got pregnant and wanted to be the one the focus was on, things started to break down between us again.

After the birth, Pola disturbed him. I took care of the child and the house. And even when I fell on my face, I had to share Radek’s enthusiasm if he came back excited about something. When I was in postpartum, he went shopping in Łódź. He brought a whole bag stuffed with clothes. He put on the waistcoat and looked at himself in the mirror with appreciation, stressing that it cost seven hundred. When he saw that I was not happy with him, he was furious. He started reproaching me for being perpetually dissatisfied. And I weighed 43 kilos and was 170 cm tall. I lacked strength.

In the summer of 2013, Pola and I were sick. I had tonsillitis, she had smallpox. He threw us out of the house. He told us to come back when we recovered. We went to my parents’ and I never went back to that house again. But all the time I was convinced that it happened that way because I couldn’t live up to his expectations.

Photography and my child turned out to be the salvation. I became the first family and children’s photographer in the city and dedicated myself wholeheartedly to this passion. My parents sold everything they had, took out a loan and bought me and Pola a flat. Mum is only now finishing paying it off.

Radek had complete control over me until last year, even though I had formed a successful relationship with my new partner Maciek for eight years and had a child with him. As soon as Radek saw there was someone new in my life, he started encircling me again.

I got married to Maciek in 2018. A few months later I got a lawsuit to terminate my parental rights. Radek said that I had bipolar disorder and that I needed to be assigned a probation officer because I didn’t know what I was doing. And that’s because I let seven-year-old Pola go alone to the shop in our village. I felt like a small, intimidated bird.

Unfortunately, I did not get a good attorney. The lawyer did not defend my interests, she made me agree to a lot of things. In the end, Radek did not take away my rights, but got all the visits he demanded.

When Pola was with him, we agreed, for example, that he would pick her up at 6pm. He had texted half an hour earlier that he was standing outside the house and asked where I was, and I explained that I was at a discount store and that I would be right over. And I felt guilty about him having to wait for me. I was still trying to meet his demands.

Pola did not like going to see her father. ‘How could the court order what I don’t want to do?’, she asked. She started crying a few days before a stay at Radek’s. And I explained that he loved her, that he wanted what’s best for her, that he was her dad after all. I never depreciated him in her eyes. Over time, I began to record our conversations because I knew the moment would come when he would accuse me of rebelling against him with my child.

In May Pola had her First Communion. Due to the pandemic, we only had a small party at home. I wanted it to be her beautiful, happy day. We agreed to invite Radek. When it was over I sat down with Pola and said: ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’. And she says, ‘Only after Daddy left, Mummy’.

Woohoo

When the time came for her to be at Radek’s, there was no question of postponing it. He only made an exception once, but that ended disastrously. It was Friday, September 10th. I asked him to let Pola stay with us as we had a bonfire planned with friends. She was very much looking forward to it. Radek owed me a day, so he agreed. The next day Pola was to let him know when she got up so he could come and pick her up. At 10 she runs into our bedroom in a panic and starts crying: ‘My dad called and said I was a liar, that we had tricked him’. I begged him not to be angry with her because it was my fault we overslept. He took her to his place and did not say anything until the next day at 12.00. And I was on Messenger with Pola all the time, she was texting: ‘Mum, save me!’.

It was her last weekend with her father. She did not want to go to him again. He initially reported the matter to the police. They only came twice, Pola each time asked them not to force her. The third time they only informed us that there had been such a report.

On October 12th she called her father for the last time and did not text him again. She didn’t want to maintain any contact, and at the same time she was constantly worried that he would be angry with her. We had to convince her that she could resist.

This was the time when I started reading a lot of psychological literature. And only then did I see what Radek was doing to all of us. And that Pola became an extension of me for him. He also criticised her. He said that her hair was dirty, that she was not nicely dressed. He did everything to take away her self-esteem, as he did mine.

Her stay with him consisted of sitting in her room, left to her own devices. He bought her clothes that she didn’t like at all, but made her wear them because that’s what he’d chosen. She threw them all away.

He controlled her phone at night. Pola now has a lot of flashbacks. She recalls, for example, him placing her thumb on her phone to unlock it at night as she slept.

Once he took her on holiday abroad. His new partner was also there. They locked Pola in a room and did not say where they were going. It was a punishment for her running around the pool with other children earlier and him not knowing where she was.

As they wrote to each other, he did not acknowledge messages that did not begin or end with ‘woohoo’. ‘Woohoo, Daddy, I’m here’. And when she forgot to add it, he added right away: ‘How about some woohoo?’. They exchanged a lot of text messages during the day, reminiscent of reporting – from the moment she woke up until the evening. It was a form of control over her, but also indirectly over me. I have it all – screenshots of messages, phone records.

In a letter to Santa, Pola recently wrote: ‘I would like an iPhone X and a happy life without my father’. We filed a lawsuit to restrict Radek’s parental rights.

Maciek has installed cameras in the house so that it is not word against word in court. He is as patient as a sundial. During my divorce and property division with Radek, he took over all the documentation. It now gives me a sense of peace and belief that it will work.

But I am also gaining it because I can see myself changing. I used to succumb to his every provocation in front of the Judicial Expert Panel, where Radek and I would meet face to face for several hours to discuss our case. I went to the last such expert interview well prepared, with screenshots, Pola’s diaries, the letter to Santa, and photos. I responded calmly to his every accusation and rebutted his arguments. For the first time I did not lower my head. And I heard from him for the first time: ‘I have nothing more to say’.

New life

When the fight for Pola started, I couldn’t focus on anything else. I didn’t even watch films because I stopped following the action after a few minutes. I then discovered crocheting. I made a big colourful shawl. When I look at it now, I know what I was thinking about with every stitch.

I stopped sleeping well. I would go over our conversations all the time. I would lay back and play everything back in my head. I went to a psychiatrist for sleep medication and she advised me to have psychotherapy. Such experiences with a narcissus cause complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

It turned out that I had repressed a lot of things. Emotional abuse causes large gaps in memory. I’m learning Spanish now, or if I don’t remember something, I don’t immediately look it up on the internet, I just try to exercise my brain. I have never experienced grief for that relationship. I escaped into photography, I was busy with the child. I have not buried some things. But when I recently found the letters I had written to Radek in my junk and which I never gave him, they didn’t touch me at all. Rather, they shocked me. I am amazed at my lack of vigilance. On the other hand, I realised that I couldn’t have realised it. Maybe if I had come across an article, a book earlier.

I sometimes wonder how I survived all this. And I am thankful that without much consequence. With Radek I was rubbish, the worst part of the world. And now I have a wonderful family, I am happy. And I don’t feel that I have lost something forever. I feel like a valuable person. I feel as if someone has loosened the noose around my neck.

The names of the characters have been changed.

 

Author: Izabela O'Sullivan

Ilustracja: Marta Frej

The text was published in „Wysokie Obcasy” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 5 March 2022