Rebuilt By Choice

He proposed to his girlfriend on my 60th birthday.

I don't believe in coincidences. That date was chosen, and he was trying to hurt me. Narcissistic rage doesn't end at the divorce papers. His clearly hasn't.

Apart from wanting to warn his new fiancée, I have no interest in what he does now. I've heard she is kind. That's what he lives off. Other people's kindness, I hope she will be ok. He made sure she blocked me everywhere, so I also know she doesn't know the truth either.

That indifference I have now though, took the longest to become true. It finally is. It's been a journey of rebuilding through my choices, and I've written about that journey and about narcissism as many people don't know the half of it.

Here are my books, all available from the link on my bio. They might be the validation / help / guidance that you seek:

💝 I Just Didn't Realise

💝 Is It Me or Is It Him?

💝 How to Stop Craving the Wrong Person

💝 Rebuilt by Choice: The Manual

💝 She Just Couldn't Tell You

With you in this, Catherine x



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One affair. That's what I thought I was dealing with, when I found out.

One affair should have been enough. He then told me about the others.

Later, another affair. His words, exactly: "I needed an affair, to get over that affair."

I didn't leave straight away. There were reasons I decided to stay, reasons that made sense to me then. Nothing about this is black and white. There's always a story behind the story.
I'm not telling you this to defend it. I'm telling you because I think the honest, complicated version is more useful than the tidy one.

Here are my books, all available from the link on my bio. They might be the validation / help / guidance that you seek:

💝 I Just Didn't Realise

💝 Is It Me or Is It Him?

💝 How to Stop Craving the Wrong Person

💝 Rebuilt by Choice: The Manual

💝 She Just Couldn't Tell You

With you in this, Catherine x
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Six years ago today, I left my home and my husband.

I was married to a covert narcissist for 29 years. Together for 32 years. When I left, I had to leave covertly (the irony) and I was a shell of who I am. I remember leaving the home I had created and brought my children up in, for the last time. I cried all the way to my parents and slept on their camp bed that night. And continued crying for days. The relief, the guilt, the shame, the overwhelm of emotions was all real and almost more than I could cope with.

I couldn't believe I'd actually done it.

Quickly though, I became determined that he would not break me.

Six years on, I'm 60. Now divorced and now living a happy, full and expansive life.

Thirty three years of that marriage still leaves scars you can't always see. I'm still finding them, and I'm still rebuilding.

I've told parts of this story before. I want to tell it properly, from the start, because I think it will help the people who are still in the middle of their own version of it.

Here are my books, all available from the link on my bio. They might be the validation / help / guidance that you seek:

❤️‍🩹 I Just Didn't Realise

❤️‍🩹Is It Me or Is It Him?

❤️‍🩹How to Stop Craving the Wrong Person

❤️‍🩹 Rebuilt by Choice: The Manual

❤️‍🩹She Just Couldn't Tell You

With you in this, Catherine x

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A person who knew my past recommended me a book, The Names by Florence Knapp. It became the next book in my book club. I didn't know it was about coercive control, how impossible it is to leave.

Knowing isn't the same as understanding, they didn't think to warn me, and I don't think they realised there was anything to warn me about.

Nobody mentioned what it was actually about, and the blurb didn't either.

I read it recognising things, not learning them.

When we sat down to discuss it, I could see it in their reactions. What I'd actually lived through landed harder on them than the fiction had. I could see the question in their faces too, even unspoken.

Surely it wasn't that bad.

Would someone really behave like that.

Even the people who know your past don't always understand what it actually meant.

That gap is real, and it isn't their fault. Coercive control doesn't need visible harm to be real harm.

Have you ever recognised your own story inside someone else's fiction?



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He screamed at me for days on holiday.

Days later, I referred back to the argument. "Which argument?" he said. I reminded him. He told me I must have imagined it. I had walked out of the heat of it and found my daughter. "I'm going to have to leave him," I told her. "Thank God," she said.

He kept coming in to find us, still shouting, even in front of her.

That was the moment that ended my marriage. I started testing him against every narcissistic trait I'd learnt about. One by one, he matched them. We were exhausted as a family by then. My children were watching for my next move.

This is gaslighting, and it's rarely as obvious as people expect:
It's not one big lie. It's the quiet, repeated denial of things you know happened.

It works because it's calm, not aggressive, which makes it easy to doubt yourself instead of him.

Over time, you stop trusting your own memory before you stop trusting his.

The people around you often see it long before you're ready to. It affects the whole family, not just you.

Recognising the pattern is often the first step out of it.

I write about the exact criteria I used in Is It Me or Is It Him?. Has anyone close to you ever known before you did?



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Dinner in a quiet restaurant, northern France, driving home from skiing. I mentioned an author we both loved. I'd replied to one of his Facebook posts, just that I couldn't wait to read his new book. He turned on me. "He will think you want to have an affair with him," he said. I defended myself against something that made no sense, while he was the one who'd had the affairs.

Not me.

I know now what that accusation actually was.

This is projection, and it's more common than people realise:
He accuses you of the exact thing he's doing or has done.

The accusation comes fast, and it comes with real anger, not confusion.

No amount of logic or evidence changes his mind.

Afterwards, you're the one left explaining yourself, not him.

It's not really about you at all. It's a way of putting his own guilt somewhere else.

I write about patterns exactly like this in Is It Me or Is It Him?. Has he ever accused you of the very thing he was doing himself?



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I'd just moored a 44 foot yacht alone, after a hard manoeuvre. He didn't say well done. He shouted at us to move faster.

When my seventeen year old son, his son too, told him not to stress, he turned on him instead. "Me or your son," he said. "If you choose him, I'm leaving."

For days after, he pushed until I made my son apologise.

It wasn't easier. I was desperately trying to cover the cracks in my marriage.

We are still healing from that moment.

It had been a lovely holiday, until it wasn't. I never should have made him say sorry.

Has your family ever been forced to choose sides that were never really yours to choose?

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A month after I left, we met. He talked about what he wanted.

"You have already had enough," he told me. He never once asked what I wanted.

He was controlling and dismissive, same as always.

Twenty minutes later, I went back to my home of fifteen years, one last time, and he greeted me as if nothing had changed.

It was his last attempt at control. Doing what he'd always done. Pulling me back in. I didn't find out until later that he'd already moved on. The smile was never about me.

I write about exactly this, the pull to bring you back in after leaving, in one of my books, that will be ready to buy through my link any day soon.

It rarely looks like apology. It looks like calm, like warmth, like nothing happened. It is still control.

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I didn't have a name for it at the time. I just had a receipt that didn't add up and a man telling me I was the problem for noticing. It took years to learn that what happened in those days has a name.

DARVO.

And that naming it is what finally let me stop doubting myself.

I've been writing a series of books that walk through this properly. Identifying what's actually happening. Understanding why it works. Rebuilding after. Due any day now. If this reached you, you'll know when it's time.



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The night before, in a hotel room, I filed for divorce. Quietly, sitting on the edge of the bath, while everyone else was elsewhere.

Then I got changed into a dress I knew made me feel like me, and went downstairs to celebrate my son's birthday. My children already knew I planned to leave within the week. They said nothing. Not that night.

He drank too much again, the way he often did. The next morning at breakfast, my children asked him if he was safe to drive. They weren't worried about him. They were worried about me, sitting beside him in that car in a few hours.

He didn't answer them. He got up, moved to sit alone at another table, and went silent.

Silent through checkout.

Silent through the drive home.

Then, in the car, the silence broke. Not directed at the children who had asked. Directed at me. He told me he was stopping my access to any money I had. With immediate effect.

My children had asked out of fear for my safety. I was the one who paid for it.

I said, "OK." I had already filed. I already had a plan. But if I hadn't, that sentence alone would have terrified me.



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