His New Supply Called Me

There comes a time for many narcissistic victims when they begin reaching out to their abuser’s former sources of supply.

Usually, they’re reaching out for clarity.

The relationship they have with the narcissist has suddenly started going sour. The mask is slipping as the breadcrumbing begins, and now they’re questioning whether or not the person they thought they knew ever existed.

The abuse cycle is in full effect and now they are torn between shock and denial. And they need to know if what they’re sensing is real.

Reaching out to the old supply is a desperate maneuver to establish some form of homeostasis.

This is where Dell was at.

So she reached out to me.

And it’s kind of a funny story the way it took place.

…

In the Spring of 2015, I got an email

It read —

Hey my name is Dell and I think we have a mutual friend in common.

I was expecting an email from my professor’s colleague.

Thinking it was them, I said something like,

Yes, Professor K told me I’d be hearing from you and I would love to meet up.

Only to get this follow-up response.

Oh, um…. no… the friend I was talking about.. is Dwayne.

My blood ran cold.

Everything got serious.

I told you about Dwayne:

The Malignant Narcissist Has One Dead Giveaway in The Bedroom
Here’s the pathology behind it and why it’ll always be their most dangerous red flag.

He was the most dangerous malignant narcissist I’d ever encountered, and when I escaped him I thought that was the end of it. But my past had just caught up with me.

And whether I realized it or not, a very strange opportunity was now knocking on my door.

Because I understood the confusion and fear Dell was feeling but unlike Dell, I didn’t have a me to reach out to. I didn’t have a Linda who would give me what I had the option of giving her,

The truth.

This is when I realized Dell wasn’t just reaching out for clarity…

Dell was reaching out for help.

And if Dwayne was doing to her any of the things he had done to me, she was going to need it. Her life depended on it, whether or not she was aware of this… yet. So I gave her my number.

And we talked.

…

Dell was growing suspicious of Dwayne’s behavior

So she went searching through his laptop and found old emails between us.

(Been there. Done exactly that. I understood.)

These emails disturbed her because they painted a different picture of what really went down in our relationship than what Dwayne told her — specifically, about the physical violence.

According to Dwayne, he’d only hit me once by accident when I “got in the way” during a bad argument.

He was referring to the very first beating, around the 4th of July, where he shoved me so hard that my temple hit the edge of a solid wood dresser,

And said —

good for you.

Until I dropped to the ground holding my head, crying hysterically.

Suddenly, it wasn’t funny anymore once Dwayne realized I was actually hurt and he might be in serious trouble — depending on the outcome.

I told Dell all of this.

Confirming one of many pieces of evidence left in his Gmail account.

Dell had read every one of my accusations and every one of Dwayne’s admissions to beating me on numerous occasions.

She even saw the pictures of my injuries attached from several different incidents, spanning several different dates.

She also read our correspondence after he’d beaten me so badly that campus police had to be notified by my professor because I showed up for my final exam with a busted lip, and he’d followed me there.

To her class.

She also found an email he sent me a year after I went no contact, apologizing for everything he put me through.

The more I confirmed the things she found and explained them, the more information I got from Dell about the lies Dwayne had told her about me and our relationship. Among them was a very specific lie he told her about his grandfather’s death.

…

Dwayne’s grandfather died two days after I caught him cheating

With his ex, Aleyda.

For some reason, Dwayne told her that not only was no one there for him throughout this ordeal except Aleyda, but he made it seem as if they were dating at that time.

This wasn’t true.

We were very much a couple.

But no I did not support him when this happened.

I was back at home, grieving the man I thought he was meanwhile, he had apparently resumed his cheating.

This was the moment Dell realized that she too had the same exact abuser I had because she noticed that Dwayne was repeating the exact same cycle of abuse cycle with Dell

Throughout the relationship, Dwayne cheated on me with Aleyda. By the time we broke up, he was cheating on both of us with a coworker at the job my mom helped him get, named Dejonae.

I remembered him telling me about her and how she was “like a sister” to him and feeling off about it.

Dell confirmed that Dwayne and Dejonae had started an “official” relationship, as ours was ending.

(Sometimes connecting with your former abuser’s new victim offers us closure and clarity, in ways we’d never expect.)

I would also learn that Dejonae was part of the reason Dwayne missed me because she was nothing like me.

I was:

passive and quiet
emotional and yet, solid
more importantly, I was also loyal

But Dejonae matched his energy.

She was just like him.

She gave him hell.

It wasn’t long before he began cheating on Dejonae with another girl who worked with them,

that girl was Dell.

…

Dell was Dejonae’s punishment and replacement

Dwayne’s relationship with Dejonae ended in the middle of their fling and just like that Dell was bumped up from ‘new supply’ to ‘main supply’,

But with a very familiar twist.

Dwayne had told Dell he wasn’t ready to be “official” with her because he “needed time to heal” from his breakup with Dejonae.

He told me the same thing when Aleyda broke up with him while we were messing around. In both cases, he was healed enough to sleep with us.

Yup.

Dell had started her relationship with Dwayne exactly the way I started mine. But now I was about to be the one to find out just how similar our relationships with him really were.

Unfortunately.

…

Dell dropped a bomb on me

Apparently, Dwayne told her that no woman he’d ever dealt with treated him the way I did. He kept emphasizing how sweet I was.

Dwayne also insisted I would come back to him one day but as time passed, and I maintained no contact, his confidence faded.

He seemed even more plagued by his past with me and it was becoming clear to Dell that I was the monkey on his back.

Eventually, Dwayne admitted to Dell that I was “the one that got away”.

Considering the fact that I escaped his abuse and survived a few of his attempts on my life, I didn’t take this as a compliment at all.

That’s when I finally asked Dell the question I’d been scared to ask the entire conversation long,

Tell me the truth Dell… has he hit you?

Everything went quiet before she told me,

He didn’t mean it.

(Smfh, of course, he did.)

Apparently, her beatings had just started and that’s why those emails urged her to reach out to me.

She remembered the bullshit story he gave her about that one fight we had and felt something might’ve been off about it.

Once she found all the evidence, Dell realized Dwayne had downplayed how badly he had been abusing me and knew that it could be her in those pictures if she gave it enough time.

And with Dwayne, it would be her.

And it wouldn’t take long.

She knew she might be in trouble.

I knew that she was.

…

Dell gave me closure and in return — I gave her the truth

After outlining the similarities of our relationships with Dwayne, I opened up to her about each of my rapes and the day Dwayne sodomized me as a birthday gift to himself.

I told Dell to get out of that relationship and as far away from him as possible because he would only get worse and she might not make it out alive. She didn’t protest because she knew it.

But Dell wasn’t ready to leave yet, I could tell.

I could feel it.

I’d been there.

And I’d been there with Dwayne.

But I spoke up anyway because I was in the position to advise her against making the same mistakes I made. I was capable and willing to do whatever I could to save her life, so I gave her what she needed the most,

The truth.

At least now she was aware.

She wasn’t basing her decision to stay strictly on the hope of things changing. Now she had a victim’s story of survival with the exact same abuser to know better. Dwayne would never change.

At least, not for the better.

And with that, we exchanged well wishes and gratitude for this private conversation that brought us both clarity.

And with that, the phone call ended.

…

In 2018, I broke ‘no contact’… and called Dwayne

Sadly, I would prove Dwayne right by reaching out to him in a phone call of my own a couple of years later. I tell you all about that conversation,

Here:

I Broke “No Contact” Twice
This was the traumatic end result of calling the malignant narcissist… to apologize.

After I apologized to Dwayne (yes, you read that correctly), I asked him how everything was.

He mentioned a car accident he’d been in and how he hurt his back trying to save his girlfriend’s life. He blamed her for his having to shield her.

Typical narcissist.

(Typical Dwayne.)

I asked him if it was Dell and everything got quiet.

He asked how I knew who she was and after I told him we’d spoken all those years ago he got quiet and said no it wasn’t her and that they had stopped talking a long time ago,

“Because she’s crazy.”

I knew this was bullshit because I knew the situation.

I also knew Dwayne.

According to him, I was crazy too.

Remember?

He also said this about a “close” friend of his who I suspected he was cheating on me with once their friendship randomly ended right before the end of our relationship. Mind you they’d been friends for nearly a decade.

And she wasn’t crazy then.

A common narcissistic tactic is calling their victims ‘crazy’ in order to discredit them.

Hearing this didn’t make me budge, at all. But what bothered me was breaking the promise I made to Dell all those years ago.

I wasn’t supposed to tell Dwayne.

Dell survived Dwayne
In a weird twist of fate… I’m semi-relieved that I broke my promise.

On the one hand, I betrayed Dell by letting him know we spoke.

On the other hand, doing this was how I found out that she did, in fact, escape him.

And this might have been the only way because I lost access to my campus email after I graduated. The only way to know, at this moment, was through Dwayne. And honestly, I really needed to know that Dell was alive.

Now I knew.

If she had been killed by him he would have said she died but framed it in a way that made it seem either accidental or her own fault. Her being “crazy” as the only reason for their breakup was a good sign.

It meant she was alive.

And that maybe she had actually been the one who discarded him.

—

About Me — Linda Sharp
The writer who has to write in order to stay alive — I am not kidding.
medium.com

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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