About

About Me:  Just your average woman trying to find peace after trauma.  Follow me as I fumble my way toward inner peace.

My story:  It’s incomprehensible to me exactly how I ended up here.  I married a professional guy from Germany, who was living and working in Japan, and brought him to the US.  We had a 10 year long-distance relationship through work before we ever thought about getting together.  Got married in Vegas; worked through the expensive immigration process. He quit his job and moved his ass to live with me in a metropolitan area in the southern US. I thought I knew him.  Oooh boy.

What is ASPD? Ok, let’s just get this out there.  I’m a professional and intelligent woman that worked my way up to director level in my career.  I’m also exceedingly kind and empathetic.  Got a hard luck story?  I’m your girl.  I’ll do everything in my power to support you and your dreams.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  People that suffer from ASPD (sociopaths, narcissists, psychopaths) are evidently drawn to people like me.  And now that I’ve had time to consider my life up to now, there has been a pattern that I was oblivious to.  My husband – let’s just call him ‘Jay’ – is a classic example of ASPD, with full blown alcoholism thrown in. I honestly had no idea what I was in for.  Jay is a charming, handsome, intelligent manipulator.

Boundaries:  Evidently I had none when it came to Jay. I’ve never been a dramatic person in my personal relationships.  Working a stressful job, peace at home had always been a priority. What did that mean exactly? Instead of fighting, I swallowed my emotions and every single time I gave him the benefit of the doubt.  He had a miserable childhood with an alcoholic single mother.  His job (after he got fired from my company) for a Japanese company was stressful — and working remotely was hard.  Moving to the US was a big adjustment.  Jay was depressed and the alcohol made him feel better.  Blah, blah, blah.  And of course, there was a lot of love-bombing going on in the beginning. It was easy to overlook all of his shortcomings, because, well, who doesn’t have them??  See?  More excuses.

The relationship: It should’ve ended before I literally lost everything.  And I mean everything. But it didn’t.  Over the course of nine years, I bought us a house, I bought him 2 different businesses, I sold everything and moved to Greece to support his dreams.  And I ended up back in the US, alone, with no car, no home, no job and no money.  Unbelievable, right?

What next?:  I suppose over time, I’ll tell the whole story. I’m searching for something that I’ve never given all that much importance to:  inner peace.  How do I move forward when everything I thought I knew about myself has been destroyed? How do I recover from the destruction that I allowed a single person to cause in my life?  How do I find ME again?  Where do I even start?

I hope you’ll join me on my journey.