Oneday,


Yep.   She isolated me from everyone.  Just fake and petty issues with everyone and then those offenses shared with me..ie
Your sister/mom/friend said this so we don't speak to them anymore.
It's a slow subtle thing..we dont know it's happening until we look around and realize our friends and family are not around so much..or we only are allowed to see family
On holidays..

I reached out to everyone when she started destroying our marriage..
Friends i hadnt talked to in 20 years..i was humble..and I found they were wonderful people still..nothing at all wrong with them.

I urge anyone going through this to make that call..that friend, family member etc that you have not talked to.  Start off with a sorry.. Tell them you've missed them..  You'll be amazed how many have missed you too..

We are not alone..they make us think we are..but we are not.

I guess our situation is a little different. He is my best (and only) friend, but it's not his doing. I've had a chronic, disabling illness now for 36 1/2 yrs, and it's kept me housebound. Part of it is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, so the name itself (a realllllly awful name for a disease because it makes fun of the one who has it making it sound like your lazy & crazy)..but... due to that, socializing and anything that has to do with going anywhere is daunting. He's tried to get me to go out with friends, but it's just too tiring. He even does ALL the shopping, and running around.
We don't even go anywhere together anymore. We did at first, as our 'new' relationship gave me some energy somehow for a few years, and I was able to do some things.
After the disclosure (which included him cheating the entire relationship), we tried reconciliation with all the books, etc. They included going out on dates/out of town weekends......He had been trying to get me to go places for years, and now that I wanted him to ask me out, ....well, we only went on 3 dinner dates (not including birthdays) from June '19 until the pandemic. Ironic, isn't it?!?!?
At any rate, he's not the one keeping me from other friends. He'd just love it if I would have some. He's even lost track of what few friends he had. He cleaned up from drugs in 2000, and lost most his "friends" of that type then. After that, he pretty much only knew guys from AA, and only casually at meetings. He has had trouble making new friends as a clean & sober person.
So, we BOTH need new friends, because we're all we've got. Our siblings aren't here. And, parents are gone. And, our relationship is strained still, so we have to find something, somewhere.
With COVID, it ain't easy! Church is where we'd start, but all the extra groups are cancelled for now. Having to wait, wait.... Heck, I haven't been away from the house since March 7th, as I'm very high risk for COVID and if I were to get it, I probably wouldn't make it, so finding friends right now is just not happening.
Sorry this was so long and....long....but, I've been cooped up with just the two of us now for months, with only my sister to talk to on the phone, and she's usually too busy to talk.
Anyway, I' through for now  ;).
 

Yes, the GIDXH isolated me to the point where I had no friends.  He was charming, "nice" and extroverted. He claimed to make male friends at work who were married. I begged for get togethers with them. He would say maybe. Then, this friend would do something to offend him and poof.  Hard to know if these were friends or stories to keep him in the closet.

I'm socializing. I've done meetups and online book clubs. It's ok, but not a venue to sustain friendships. I have to be patient with COVID. That's been an issue for most of us here. It's a little depressing today. Am impatient & feeling sorry for myself.. Apologies for being a Debbie Downer.
.
Rob, that's a great suggestion about looking up old friends.  It doesn't hurt to try. Glad it worked for you.

I am wishing good thoughts to meet good people and find good friends!

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Edited to be more positive. Not a great day today.

Last edited by MJM017 (July 19, 2020 8:58 pm)

This happened to me as well.  I tried so hard to make my GID narcissist wife happy that I let her isolate me from other people.  It seemed like she didn't want me to have a life apart from her, so I stopped developing my own life.  Old friendships withered.  In my case, though, there was another aspect: my time with my GID narcissist wife coincided with the rise of social media.

I remember reading this The Atlantic article that eventually got adapted into The Social Network.  Right away, I began to think that Zuckerberg was a sociopath, and I decided not to join.  Why would I give away my information, my thoughts, and my creative expression to be commercially exploited by a sociopath?  To this day, I never joined facebook, but my GID narcissist wife joined early on.  I thought she was foolish and desperate for collecting hundreds of FB friends.  How deep can these friendships possibly be?  It seemed so shallow and performative to me.  For her, I think it was yet another way to control and project the image she had wanted to project.  Even though she would agree with me when I talked about Zuckerberg's likely sociopathy, and the negative effects of performative social media, she would turn around and spend hours on facebook.  She would brag about reconnecting with old boyfriends, and long lost friends.  She facebook friended all my old friends and slowly but surely became the gatekeeper to my friendships.  At first, she would share with me some of the information she learned from facebook, but eventually, that stopped too.  I was isolated and cut off.  After many years, it became clear to me that through facebook, my GID narcissist wife had even coopted my relationships with my own family members.  My own mother stopped calling me because she was getting updates from my GID narcissist wife.  I felt more isolated and alone than ever.

This is partly why I think so many people -including my family- had a hard time understanding why I was growing so miserable in my sexless marriage to my controlling GID narcissist wife.  The only thing people really knew about us was everything she was projecting.   

This is partly why when I finally started talking about how miserable I was, it cost me dearly.  Though I thought my actions and my career had spoken for itself, I didn't realize how much of other people's perceptions of me were wrapped up in my GID narcissist wife's facebook feed.  Suddenly, as I began to speak about me, people were confronted with a version of me they did not know at all.  Her performative projections were so ingrained, that I was seen as the problem.  'What is wrong with him?'

This external rejection of me, on top of the internal gaslighting and all of the other emotionally abusive behaviors I was facing, contributed to my eventual breakdown.  It all cost me my career.

I had a therapist, and I felt a good amount of trust with her.  Unfortunately, it just so happened that my therapist was a gay woman formerly married to a man, and now married to a woman.  When my GID narcissist wife was finally forced to tell a bit of the truth about her 5-year-long affair with a gay woman after my young daughter accidentally found the sexts, I could no longer trust my therapist either.  And it wasn't my therapist's fault.  It was that I did not need to be in a lgbtq centric environment anymore.  I have no problem with being gay or trans.  I'm just entirely straight and I feel like I now need to 'come out' as heterosexual.

Now, I do not have a therapist as I try to recover from the damage.  Were I to get another therapist, I would try to find a masculinist - a straight man who would understand my own attraction to female breasts, etc.  Of course, my need for heterosexual recovery coincides with a bad time in our culture for men to talk openly about females in a sexual way.  (To all you wonderful women reading this, please understand that I mean zero disrespect.  You all are smart and capable humans.  It is just that my understanding of my own sexuality has been crushed by a selfish woman.). It also coincides with a bad time in our culture for heterosexual people to openly talk about any negatives associated with being lgbtq.  

So, as I sit here during a pandemic which has eliminated my possible chance to rebuild my career, and shut down my possible chance to date widely, I am faced with the fact that I do not trust my old friendships and I do not trust therapy (which I can no longer pay for anyway).  The only source of information that has been helpful to me is the men on the SSN forum posting about their similar experiences being married to GID narcissist wives.  

This seems to be common, unfortunately.  My ex-wife had issues with everybody who wasn't one of her hand-selected friends, and that included members of my family.  She always had issues with my family, and those issues were bullshit.  Ultimately, it comes down to them wanting to maintain The Lie, and they don't want anyone else to blow their cover.