In Part 1 I gave you a small dose of my life with a stalker ex and revealed that the bad relationship I had with her is why I got into figuring out dating and relationships in the first place. In part two, I’m going to talk about why the stalking behavior is the wrong way for ex’s to behave, what their motivation is to stalk you, their mindset and how they operate. I’ll also be sharing more of my story.

Motivations of The Obsessive Ex

Stalkers. They need to be stood up to because they’re bullies. Their end goal is either to punish you or to get their way with you somehow (i.e., get you back into a relationship). These two motivations are called revenge and attachment. Sometimes ex’s can exhibit one or the other, and sometimes they exhibit both.

We’re taught from a young age that revenge is wrong, and so it seems like naturally that would be wrong (wishing ill will toward others, two wrongs don’t make a right, violence never solved anything, etc…), but we’re never really taught when attachment is bad or why. Attachment goes bad when love becomes about controlling someone else. At this point one person ceases to be a person in the other ones eyes, and is viewed as property instead.

The Obsessive Ex Mindset

In either case, revenge or attachment, it is about control. The person feels like they have no control over themselves (which is why they can go to such extremes to “get you back”) and so they must exert their control over you. If they could just control you, they would be able to control themselves. This controlling behavior is harmful though, and they fail to see that.

Let’s say best case scenario is they just want to be your friend, to just have a small place in your life. But you don’t want them as them as a friend. In fact, you don’t want them in your life at all anymore, period. This is a right you have, the right to happiness, life and liberty. A stalkers controlling behavior is going to rob you of that. How is robbing another human being of these rights supposed to heal a relationship?

To further compound this, they will very often go to extreme lengths and use whatever information they can to support their assumption and to rationalize out how their needs and wants are more important than your rights. Tell me how that pattern of thinking makes any sense. It doesn’t. But this is how they think.

They think, act and treat you like you’re a piece of property. They fail to recognize you are a person anymore. This mindset acts like a catalyst for more stalking behavior, as you are no longer a person, who has rights and freedoms, but you are a piece of property to be owned and controlled.

They will do whatever they can think of to control you and manipulate you into doing something they want, sometimes as far as committing heinous and violent acts on you or your loved ones. They can do this because they see other people in your life as tools for them to get what they want from you. In other words, they stop seeing them as people too. They will attempt to use your friends to influence you into doing what they want. They may threaten to hurt someone if you don’t do what they want. The scariest part is when they don’t say they’ll hurt people to get to you, because then you never see it coming.

Denial: Blocking The Breakup

In the obsessive girlfriend meme picture I used in the first part of this article, YOU BROKE UP WITH ME 4 YEARS AGO BUT I DIDN’T BREAK UP WITH YOU YET was used to illustrate this denial. The relationship isn’t over until they have decided it’s over. The problem is, they don’t get to decide when it’s over, and so the issue again comes back down to control.

When you initiate a breakup, one way the obsessive ex will try to rationalize this out is by thinking that this is just an argument, that there’s still something or some way to fix it, and the problem is only temporary. This boils back down to them not seeing you as a person anymore, which is the second way they will block the break up.

My Obsessive Ex doesn’t care about me as a person, she only cares about how having me in her life made her look to others. She would show me off to her friends or acquaintances as if I were a new car. Her mentality was “Look at me! I have a man! I’m worth something!”

This was a second way in which she refused to see me as the person I am. Our relationship was more about what she got out of it than it was about us, and when I broke it off with her that was a huge inconvenience because she could no longer objectify the relationship. I was no longer around to be dominated or make her feel powerful because she could “keep” me. She didn’t care if I was happy in our relationship or not, she only cared that she wanted me there.

I touched on this a bit earlier, but the third way an obsessive ex will block a breakup is with their irrational sense of entitlement. This is about her needs, wants and desires being more important than mine. When I decided that my needs were more important than her needs, she became enraged, as this didn’t fit her model of the world. (In fact, she became enraged when anyone challenged her model of the world. She couldn’t face the truth and would become violent to the point where she would viscously attack someone, though it was never me.) Because she is the center of her world, anyone who dared to challenge her world was deemed an enemy.

The fourth and final way obsessors deny their breakups is by punishing the leaving partner. Their desire to punish the leaving person comes from them feeling and believing they have been wronged, but not just wronged, but so very, deeply wronged. Even if in some way they have actually been wronged, their sense of “justice” becomes so completely out of proportion compared to what actually happened that it becomes detrimental their life, the life of the ex, and even the lives of others. They cannot let go of the emotional connection they once had with their ex.

Victim Mentality

I should point out here that this is “victim mentality”. But since obsessors don’t like being a victim, they see to make you a victim instead. They don’t realize that feeling like a victim is a creation of their own imagination. They cannot see how they were the ones who created that reality for themselves through the way that they’ve interpreted your actions. So they seek out to make you the victim, and again, it comes down to control. Since they do not believe that they have any control over feeling like a victim, they will attempt to assert their control over you, as they see you as an offender.

A deeper point here is that perhaps they were at one point, actually a victim. I know (or at least I was told and I cannot believe it altogether because the depth of her lies ran so deep) that she was a victim in her early childhood and it is for this reason that I can find compassion and forgiveness my ex. But even still, perhaps this is just another way of being controlled. A person could go crazy thinking about this, and if it wasn’t the right thing to do anyway, I would still probably be mad at her. But I have much better things to do with my life.

Triggers: Why Your Obsessive Ex Comes Back When You Least Expect It

When it comes to obsessive behavior in ex’s, I’ve seen examples of when there was no activity (or at least when there is no immediate activity that impresses upon the life of the partner who left) there are periods where they have cooled down a bit, and then there are periods where something triggers them again and they pop up out of the blue.

In part one I wrote that I was contacted by her again last week. I believe what triggered this latest round of her frontal assault is that she recently found out I am a dating and relationship coach. That information goes directly against her world view, and explains why it would set off more obsessive behavior and naturally, I’m the bad guy in her world so it all comes directed at me somehow.

I say somehow because her favorite strategy seems to be to contact me, but then when I block her out, she loses that and starts to take aim at the other people in my life. If she can’t get to me directly, she’s going to get to me through someone else. Again, this is because we are all things in her universe for her to do with what she pleases.

Here is the text message exchange I had with her two weeks ago:

Crazy Ex: Did you think I couldnt find you? Mon amour (this means, my love, in French)
Me: Who cares if you found me if I wasn’t hiding to begin with? And who’s this?
Crazy Ex: You were from me babe
Me: Think you got the wrong number.
Crazy Ex: No I have the right one.
Me: No more games or I’m blocking you. No time for bullshit. Who is this?
Crazy Ex: Tu sois mienne pour toujours (French for: You are mine forever.)
Me: Bye.

(You Are Mine Forever, I just had to put that in the Obsessive Girlfriend meme for this installment, lol)

The first text from her I just thought was one of my friends messing with me. We do that sort of shit to each other. I genuinely misinterpreted her second text so I didn’t get it. Third text I was done, I don’t have time for games, but I still wasn’t sure it was her. By her fourth text I knew it was her. Who else would tell me she wants to own me in French? No one.

A few hours after this took place, she was reportedly seen passing by my house in a car with two other people, whom she no doubt has wrapped up in her little fantasy world.

A few days or a week later, my girlfriend received an email from who it only could be, the crazy ex. It was short, only a couple of sentences, and  of course it was from some email address that she thinks can’t be traced back to her. In it she tried to expose to my girlfriend how I had seen someone else. Too bad for the crazy ex, my current girlfriend already knew. (I’m polyamorous.)

But this got me to thinking about how she’s done this before. Oh yeah, she’s contacted girls I was seeing before. The first time, this was years ago but I’ll never forget it, (and I didn’t find all of this out until after,) she contacted all of my female friends on MySpace (1100+) with a simple question. How do you know my husband? (Remember from part 1 that we were never married? This is her lie to assert maximum control over me.)

One day I called up the girl I was seeing and she was mad, said she’d call me back she was driving. She called me back and asked me if was married and who that girl was who contacted her. My response? I see you’ve met my crazy ex. But by then, the damage had been done. Luckily, that was the only relationship she’s ruined. And I’m sure when she reads this she’ll feel really good about herself. Well, good for her, but she’ll never be able to ruin another relationship again, and she hasn’t since then. I’ve taken the measures to ensure that.

TO BE CONTINUED… AGAIN…

COMING UP IN PART THREE:

I know I promised to talk about a couple of things, and they’re coming up:

– The 6 Stages of The Obsessive Ex
–  My Motivation For This Article
– How To Take Action Against Your Ex
– The 8 Things You Can Do To Fend Off Your Obsessive Ex
–  What You’re Doing That Is Keeping Your Obsessive Ex Around
– And more…

~Matt Adams

P.S. If you’ve found this article helpful and/or informative please Comment, Tweet, Like, and +1 below.

UPDATE: More and more people are finding and reading these articles and are contacting me asking for help, so I have decided to start a private Facebook group for people who would like to vent, ask for help, connect with others, learn how to fight back, share their stories, and whatever else will contribute to others. To join the group, send me a friend request and a message on Facebook (I can’t add you otherwise because it’s a secret group), and I will add you.

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