Free Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This by Blue Sullivan Page B

components—criticism, control, humiliation, hypocrisy, intimidation, jealousy, possessiveness, disrespect, and misogyny. An abuser may mask most of these behaviors at first, but the last one often rears its ugly head without his consent. Some abusers may not even be consciously aware of how deeply their contempt, even hatred, of women goes. Their cycle of abusive behavior has been a constant in their lives for so many years that, to the abuser, it’s the norm, and you (along with many poor women before you) are the one who’s “abnormal.” In the context of our earlier competition analogy, the chronic abuser has built a strategy for “winning” his malignant ongoing campaign. The very fact that he’s not in jail or in perpetual isolation is the depressing proof that his warped mindset “works.”
    A very close friend of mine, who we will call Lisa, was engaged to be married a few years ago. Her story sounds like a lurid Lifetime melodrama, but I assure you that every bit of it is true. If the initial back story seems like a digression, I’m sharing it to show just how much this girl suffered both prior to and during her year-long encounter with a sociopath, who I’ll call Matt.
    Lisa’s story goes like this:
    Lisa was earning six figures working for a highly prestigious west coast PR agency. Over the course of several years in well-paid positions, Lisa had managed, through personal investment and her 401K, to amass enough of a nest egg that retirement at forty-five wasn’t just a potential idea; it looked like a genuine inevitability—the reward for two decades of hard work, great money management, and diligent saving.
    Then, on a Friday afternoon, a drunk driver on the freeway took it all away. Cutting across five lanes of speeding traffic, the driver (who was never prosecuted or even identified) caused a fourteen-car, high-speed crash that killed three drivers.
    Despite odds heavily against her, Lisa survived. However, the crash left her in a wheelchair, where she was told she’d likely remain. After $240,000 worth of surgery (which her insurance company deemed “experimental” and thus didn’t cover), she began a slow process toward an unlikely recovery. Unable to work, without a car and now destitute, Lisa’s future looked dire as she attempted to put her life back together without any resources and cut off from her family three thousand miles away.
    Salvation appeared to come from the unlikeliest of sources: an old high school boyfriend, Matt. She’d dated Matt off and on in her junior and senior years. When she left for college out of state, Lisa had parted with Matt. Then, as if guided by the kind hand of divine providence, Matt reappeared and offered his assistance just when Lisa needed it most.
    Matt moved Lisa into his cavernous home in the Pacific Northwest. There she could rest, recuperate, continue her physical therapy, and start to rebuild her shattered existence. In the intervening years since high school, Matt had become a millionaire several times over from the spoils of his deceased father’s trust fund.
    “Just rest and get better,” he said. “I will take care of you.”
    The next few months demonstrated the extraordinary perseverance that had always been Lisa’s calling card. She would walk again, and far sooner than any of her doctors’ most optimistic predictions. During this time, she and Matt rediscovered the feelings they had shared in high school, and more.
    Then, to sum it up in a familiar phrase, the wheels started to come off.
    This started when Lisa had almost completed her physical therapy after many months of tireless zeal. She no longer needed crutches and could get in and out of chairs and bed without Matt’s assistance. The pain had lessened considerably, and she no longer needed to take the powerful painkillers her doctors had prescribed to prevent her from writhing in agony all day and nightly when she went to bed. Her whip-smart brain wasn’t a cloudy haze of