Hello, again...All of your posts are my lifeline to sanity right now. I just spent a half hour re-reading all of them because I was feeling weak and vulnerable, and even considering emailing or calling this man.
I couldn't sleep last night, and kept looking at the clock, until around 5 a.m. I finally fell asleep for a couple of hours. But during that time of trying to drift off, a revelation came to me. My first sexual relationship, at age 21, while in college, was with a man who behaved very much like this Ph.D. fella. Because it was my first experience with sexual intimacy, in which I held on much much longer that I should have till I was imagining stabbing myself in the chest with knives!, and accepting the emotional abuse from this man, I was traumatized by it. In the years since, thru a 20 year marriage, and several attempts at relationships since my divorce, I have realized what I SHOULD have done in that first painful experience...WALK AWAY...early on, rather than continue to be the doormat.
Waking from attempted sleep with this realization in the middle of last night, I recognized that this recent experience with the Ph.D., with the eery similarities to that first sexual experience, can be a closure for me...IF I turn my back on it now...PERIOD! I have visualized over the many years how I SHOULD have behaved with that first emotional/sexual abuser. Now is my chance to finally, at age 54, do so.
I recognize that I am not well yet, but I also have past relationships which took lots of energy to recover from, and for those men I feel NOTHING!!!, so I know that in time, it will be the same with this one.
Thanks so much to all of you who responded so caringly to my plight. I am going to do as Chatty has suggested, and try to give feedback to other discussions on this site, moving away from obsessing about myself.
ARI