How to Get Over an Abusive Girlfriend or Wife: Break the Routines
She’s finally out of your life. The last of her things have been removed from your home, and she’s gone. You have a tremendous sense of emptiness, and a tremendous sense of relief. And, let’s face it, you feel pretty guilty about feeling the relief.
What do you do next? The house is finally quiet. She’s not there to scream at you. She’s not there to dictate what you eat, what you watch on TV, what music you listen to, what you wear, how long you’re in the bathroom, what brand of soap to use, how long to wash your hands, how to fold the towels, or the sheets, what time you go to bed, or what time you get up, when and how you talk to her, and what time you’re allowed to come home from work. What do you do?!
Your ex may not have been this controlling. Mine was. And when she was finally gone, the silence was deafening.
As I’ve written about before, her controlling nature and gaslighting eventually caused me severe cognitive difficulties. I was simply unable to function. One day, I even made it halfway to work, and noticed I was still wearing my pajamas. I had to stop at Target and buy clothes on my way in. Even now, two years out, I still have memory lapses, difficulty remembering names or other simple things. But that’s something for another post.
What do you do when she’s gone? Break the routines. Stop doing everything her way. Stop. You didn’t do things that way before she came into your life and you managed pretty well, didn’t you? Remember? Every habit of hers you’ve taken on, even if it is something as simple as folding the towels a certain way to appease her, needs to stop.
This will take effort.
One thing my ex insisted on was that we enter and exit the apartment via the back door. The front door was not to be used under any circumstances. To this day, I have no idea why. After she left, I noticed that I was still using the back door. I forced myself to stop. Even if I’d already entered or exited via the back door, I made myself turn around, go back, and use the front door. It took a while, but I got it.
Now is your chance to do all those things you were forbidden to do. Watch gory movies! Turn the music up loud! Leave the dishes until the following day! Cook what you want for dinner. Stay up as late as you want. Rediscover the things you used to enjoy doing.
Did she make you sit through endless hours of Sex and the City or Grey’s Anatomy? Put in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or The Godfather. Go buy that thing she wouldn’t let you own.
When you’re ready to take the next step, there are a few things I would suggest:
- Get a new bed: Seriously, I cannot even begin to emphasize how much this helps psychologically. There’s too much history wrapped up in the old bed. Get rid of it. Start fresh. I promise, you will sleep better.
- Change the locks: This should be a no-brainer. You don’t know if she’s surreptitiously made copies of keys, or taken hers with her. Take charge of the security of your surroundings. She does NOT need access to the home anymore. You don’t need to come home and find her there or your personal possessions missing.
- Return her mail: Chances are that she probably has not filed a change-of-address form with the post office. You will get mail for her, which she can then blame you for not forwarding. DO NOT FORWARD HER MAIL TO HER. YOU ARE NOT HER POST OFFICE. There are trained professionals who do that. They are called mail carriers. There is something deeply satisfying about marking her mail “no longer lives here, return to sender” and dropping it in the mailbox. Not your fault if she doesn’t get her latest credit card, W-2 or other important document on time. She should have filed with the post office.
- Change your phone number: If you have children, this, unfortunately, probably isn’t good advice. But, if you don’t, there’s no reason she needs to know how to get a hold of you anymore.
- Change your e-mail address: See above. Coupled with the fact that she, in all honesty, has probably hacked into your e-mail, looking for something to use against you. My ex gained access to my e-mail and I felt extremely violated. In fact, I stopped answering (or even checking) my e-mail for months afterward. Eventually, upon settling on a new e-mail address, I’ve gotten better about this. Again, if you have kids (which, really is the only reason to maintain contact that I can think of, this may not be an option).
- Move: Eventually, the memories of being with her in my old apartment became too much. I was in constant fear that I would find her there waiting for me. Additionally, there wasn’t a room in the apartment that didn’t have “psychic residue” of too many fights lingering in the air. I relocated to another town entirely and live in a place that has no shared history with her. I am happier and feel safer than I ever did in the old place. She and I lived together for 7 months, but that was enough to completely obliterate the “good” memories I’d had in the two years in that apartment prior to her being there. Start over. Start fresh.
If you are the one leaving, rather than her, you can still do pretty much all of these things. If there aren’t kids involved, again, I can’t think of any good or logical reason for her to know your whereabouts. Just make sure you fill out the change-of-address card with the post office. You don’t need her reading your mail.
Finally, and this is particularly hard – I KNOW – be prepared to sacrifice mutual friends. I know that some of them are good people. I know that some of them are close friends. But if they weren’t your friends before the relationship, they may not be your friends after the relationship.
Chances are, you’ve been smeared to them for quite some time and they will probably have a warped view of you. Even if that’s not the case, you don’t need to accidentally run into her, via them, or have them inadvertently let her know where you are. Letting go of some of these friends will hurt. But, I promise you, the security and peace of mind you have with her out of your life, and not knowing where you are, will more than make up for it. While I’m at it, there is absolutely NO reason to maintain contact with her family, unless, again, there are kids involved.
Break the routines she instilled in you.
Build new ones, and better ones; ones that are your own.
It’s your life, again. You have it back.
Shrink4Men Coaching and Consulting Services:
Dr Tara J. Palmatier provides confidential, fee-for-service, consultation/coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.
52 Responses to “How to Get Over an Abusive Girlfriend or Wife: Break the Routines”
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We never lived together and she moved across the country so that part was easy.
I took a cruise and bought a new (in 1987) 300ZX Turbo. She saw it and asked, “What’s this?”
“The downpayment on what would have been our house.”
I felt better.
lol…also, I would rather sleep in the car than in the same house with that B**ch…
The bed was an idea I never thought of! The others are important for safety reasons, if nothing else.
Fortunately, no kids are involved in my situation (ex-gf, BPD). Although I will miss communicating with some of her family members, we had NO mutual friends whatsoever. Matter of fact, I couldn’t stand most of her friends. They were all guys, and she manipulated them in order to create feelings of jealousy and insecurity on my part. It worked most of the time. I’m sure she smeared me fairly well and I didn’t always maintain my composure around them later in the relationship – which only gave her “nuggets” to use against me.
Perhaps this is another topic, but I think women who have 0 female friends and 20 male ‘friends’ that they hang out with on a regular basis should be a HUGE red flag for any healthy guy to be aware of.
My ex has weird friends, too. She was involved in an organization deemed by experts to be a cult and still has at least one friend from that experience. As a compulsive athlete, she would go on and on about other guys and their bodies, legs, muscles, etc.
She even has a friend who I suspect might have HPD given her histrionic behaviors and episodes of accusing her husband of spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on prostitutes. I used to believe those stories, now I suspect they were lies just like my ex has used.
I’m in agreement with you about the lack of mutual friends, but we did have a handful. She executed years of distortions against me and got some of those few to side with her, too. Some have been willing to engage in harassment, too, breaking rules and laws to help her out and terrorize me.
I suspect that at least one of them was a guy involved in an affair with her, but can’t prove it. There is plenty of incriminating data that suggests she had many affairs over the years, much of it I did not discover until after she filed for divorce. Meantime, she was falsely accusing me of having affairs — she’s a big fan of using projection to hide her own disgusting behaviors.
The guy friends of Borderlines, Narcissists, or similar abusive women can be very dangerous people in my experience. It’s like they are willing to believe all the lies and help execute attacks to get something — attention, sexual favors, whatever — from her.
I remember reading about a woman in Pennsylvania named Wendy Flanders and her boyfriend who actually went so far as to try to frame her ex-boyfriend Ben Vonderheide (a father of one of her children) for a restraining order violation in a courthouse. If it wasn’t for him understanding how dishonest they were and systematically recording everything (even in the courthouse where it is illegal) he would probably have ended up being prosecuted for their allegations. But as it is, even though Flanders and her boyfriend were convicted of filing false police reports, they continue to do a huge amount of damage to their victim. It turns out from what Vonderheide found out that she has engaged in similar terrorism against other other ex-boyfriends, too, even using false child sexual abuse allegations against one of them to keep him from seeing their daughter.
I was lucky that none of my ex’s male friends were ‘negative advocates’ – at least not in the direct sense. I never had open conflicts with them. However, I know they probably believed everything she told them about me, etc. Oh well, water under the bridge!
Dietrich, I know the kind of thing you’re talking about — a woman who has guys hanging all over her wherever she goes. But in general, I’m not sure there is any correlation between Cluster B and the sex of their friends. I know plenty of perfectly normal women who prefer the company of male friends; there’s a bunch of them in the engineering field. In contrast, my BPD ex had mostly female friends. I came to realize that she chose them mainly on the basis of their being willing to support her and help her cover up her affairs and indiscretions. She had a friend whom I’ll call “R”. They were pretty close for several years. Then one day she wasn’t friends with R any more. I asked her why not and she didn’t have any explanation. Found out later that the real reason was that she asked R to lie for her and tell everyone that R had gone to lunch with her on a particular day. What the ex had actually done that day was sneak off somewhere with a (married) co-worker for a nooner; they had been seen by a mutual acquaintance and she wanted R to help her cover it up. R refused to lie for her. End of friendship.
Yes, I didn’t mean to imply a correlation. And I can definitely see how ‘chosen friends’ are based on their capacity to be manipulated, used as objects for support, covering up affairs, etc.
While I think it’s “normal” for women to have lots of male friends, I think it becomes abnormal when they shun females entirely. It’s like a queen bee thing where they want to be the center of attention with their guy friends and not have to compete with other females. Throw a boyfriend in the mix and you have all kinds of wierd triangles going on.
My ex has said that she doesn’t like other women as friends “because they are catty” and she “can’t trust them”. She is not a super-model and is quite average in appearance, so I’m confident that most of her male friends probably didn’t have sexual motivations towards her.
Perhaps my ex simply saw these men as being easier to control? Although this is not entirely related to the abusive behaviors of Cluster Bs, I would be interested in hearing Dr. Tara’s thoughts on this…
That could be, if the social norm of men being more deferential to women still holds. It’s not too hard for a woman to take on the ingenue role and have a lot of men doing things for her. My ex was actually pretty good at playing that role herself.
Good article. That’s when you find out who your real friends are.
I’ve experienced the email hacking and violations of privacy, too. But it wasn’t my ex who did it, it was the guy with whom she had an affair that started while she was a few months pregnant with our oldest child. She reportedly contracted an STD from this guy, putting our baby and me at risk, and hid it. She kept stringing him along for years, all the while hiding her affair.
Years later, after she filed for divorce, she got this guy to help her with divorce paperwork, spreading false child molestation allegations against me, and more. He’s an abusive person himself, leaning more towards NPD than anything else from what I can gather. He kept going on with the affair with my ex even while he was married. Eventually his wife found out and contacted me after they had divorced because she was alarmed by the things she had been seeing about me and suspected that her ex and mine were conspiring to destroy me, which is fact they were.
He found out about it, then hacked into her email account and even tried to impersonate her to disrupt the communications.
Abusers team up with other abusers. It is the nature of how these people work. This might also explain in part why courts (filled with abusive judges and lawyers) side with abusers, too. They know if they do their jobs right by siding with abusers, the family will provide a decade or more income for them and their associates.
Another great article, Kev. Like others, I didn’t think about the bed.
When I broke up with my BPD girlfriend, I stayed up late and purged the house of everything she gave me. I deleted her number from my phone and all of the E-mail messages. I threw away every present, card and scrap of paper that was connected with her. I even blacked out her name in the phone book so I would not be tempted to call her.
It was a difficult and time consuming task.
I recently found something that I had missed. My response was something like, “damn, I thought I got rid of that months ago”.
Keep up the good work.
Good advice. I notice the little things – like how quiet it is if I decide I’d like to smoke a good cigar once in a while. How I don’t have to sit down to pee any more. How I can keep beer/wine/liquor in the house for more than a week without having to go buy more. How I actually have money in the bank occasionally.
The bed – that brings back memories. I always got up before her to go to work, so I never had to make the bed. Exactly twice in our relationship, I stayed home to work, and got up after her. When I got up, I made the bed, just the way she did – I thought!
On both occasions, when she got home, she went on a rant – “YOU DIDN’T MAKE THE BED!!”. Excuse me? Of course I made the bed. Nope. I asked her “Are you saying I didn’t make the bed “right”?” Nope. I didn’t make it, period. Because it wasn’t made exactly the way she wanted it done, in her mind, it wasn’t done at all. ??????? How does one deal with that kind of mindset?
Mine would leave her own clothes scattered all over her bedroom (we didn’t regularly share a bed for the last ten years of our marriage, though I had my clothes in there), but if I so much as left one t-shirt on the floor, she would go ballistic. A couple of times I would stack all the clothes she left scattered around next to my lonely shirt, or maybe shirt or two, and she would snarl “That’s different. I am not expecting you to pick my clothes up.”
Spring cleaning was a nightmare. She would demand we would do each room, one at a time, then close the door of each room as they were done…to ensure the other rooms not done yet did not “contaminate” what we had completed.
It was nuts. There were other things, too. And, I went along with them, damn it.
Pardon me, why I go throw a few potato chips and peanuts around the living room floor.
The abuser is not always the one to leave the home. For some, that first paragraph:
might be more accurately written:
She’s finally out of your life for a few moments. She’s taken everything from your home, including your children and your financial and personal records, or has taken your home and everything from you via a TRO kick-out order banning you from speaking with or seeing your kids obtained with her boundless lies and zero evidence. You have a tremendous sense of fear about what will happen to your children and you, combined with a tremendous sense of relief that you don’t have to listen to her daily emotional and verbal abuse any more. And, let’s face it, you feel pretty guilty about feeling the relief. Now if you can only find someplace to be safe from her next attack…
Great one Kev. It does help to think of things to do post the relationship…Coincidentally I was thinking about (1) this morning while making the bed. I thought about (6) since the beginning of the year, but haven’t got around to do it yet…mmmh!
For those Guys who are still involved with high conflicts but have no kids, PLEASE REALISE HOW LUCKY YOU REALLY ARE RIGHT NOW. I know I cant wish away my kids but how I wish I didn’t have my kids with her…
“I know I cant wish away my kids but how I wish I didn’t have my kids with her…” I have heard my husband say this same thing to me about his ex. We are counting down the days to them turning 18 and they are old enough to make their own decisions. It’s not so much that he is wishing his children (or their childhood) away, but anticipating life without her manipulation (because when children are involved, that cord cannot be cut) or dreaming of what it would have been like without her ever in it again.
Changing the bed is a great idea; however, may I suggest you take it a step farther? Change the entire room. When my husband and his ex split, he totally repainted the room in colors he loved (and she would no doubt dislike), got a new bed (beautiful, comfy King size) and re-arranged the room. He felt satisfaction that, for a change, he could put out things that were precious to him and it didn’t matter if they matched the decor. Re-arranging, painting and replacing the bed were actually very therapeutic for him.