In the world I come from, mindfuck has absolutely no positive
connotations. It is the pinnacle of emotional manipulation and control.
The target is, in the end, little more than a codependent husk of the former
self. The mindfuck is a horrible way to exact revenge. Some do it just because
they like it, or because they can't help themselves. Very often, the person
doing the fucking has one or more personality disorders.
It all started innocently enough. I was young, but old enough to be trying out
independence. She was older, and strangely attractive to me, both physically
and emotionally. She drew me in with the savior complex: I was her savior,
even though I was three years younger (three very important years). I was
flattered by her attentions, and my ego inflated greatly. The flirting soon
led to a dating relationship, and that was followed by a sexual
relationship.
And then the mindfuck began.
At the time, I considered myself a pretty easy going person. I didn't think
that I would be one to be a jealous boyfriend. But then she began to gently
pluck the jealousy string by spending more time with my best friend than with
me. Oh, sure, she still took me down to her house after school and fucked me
blue in the face, but it was he who spent weekends at her house, it
was for him that she waited after class.
None of this was subtle; my classmates (who already
disliked me anyway) noticed and were sure to shove it in my face. The rumors
started about a love triangle. Even my teachers made snide remarks about it,
years later at graduation. But for some reason, it was already too late. My
malleable freshman personality had been formed to take the insult, the
humiliation. The budding friendships I had managed to make in my new school
quickly evaporated. My once best friend became my biggest nemesis.
She began to make evening trips to his house, to "study." I was
extremely dubious. I began to make nightly trips to his house as well, but I
wasn't invited inside. I found a tree that had a perfect view of his den.
Night after night she went, and night after night, she studied at his house.
Nothing else appeared to be going on. He was getting the mindfuck too. The last
night I made my journey, I left a psychotic message in her car. I ripped out
a page of one of her textbooks and scrawled something on it that I thought was
threatening. Oddly, it appeared to have the desired effect: she stopped
going to his house at night, and returned to our old habits of talking to me on
the phone instead. It wasn't until many months later that she ever even
mentioned the note. She claimed then that it had scared her badly to know
that I had been there. At that point, I didn't even care.
My life was slowly spinning into a vortex with her name on it. At some point, I
realized that I didn't even have any of my own thoughts anymore - all my
thoughts were all hers. She had managed to completely devour my personality, my
self, and I didn't even notice.
The beginning of the end of the mindfuck was begun with a masterful stroke of
genius. She broke up with me during the summer before she left for college.
She wanted "see other people" and I was 1500 miles away when she did
it; I had no recourse. She dated other people that summer and I was lost in a
rage so immense that I don't think I spoke to a single person for two months.
She was gone to
college before I got back. Of course, I still heard from her from time to time.
She continued to exert her control over me, even as I was beginning to pick up
the little shards of my life. Somehow, I managed to make some new friends, and
even started dating
someone else - someone cool, smart, pretty, and in most every way the complete
opposite of my mindfucker. She treated me with respect, she saw me as an equal.
She was my friend as well as my lover. Recovery began, as I started to become
my own person again.
At Thanksgiving, the mindfucker came home, came back into my world. She
invited me down to her house for
dinner with her family. I, of course, went. We sat around and shot the shit
for awhile. Then she started talking about her boyfriend back at college. She
talked about the constant sex they were having. And then she performed her
master stroke: she claimed he was nothing compared to me, and couldn't I just
take her out back for a good, hard fuck?
After that night, I never saw her again. I had betrayed the trust of my
girlfriend by sleeping with my ex, a manipulative, psychotic girl who should
probably have been institutionalized. Though I never told my new girlfriend, I
(at least) broke up with her. The guilt was just too much for me. Looking
back, I can see all the manipulation, but at the time, I was just convinced that
I was a worthless person who had screwed up my one chance at love.
Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. I had just been
mindfucked for almost three years. I was a mess. But it is possible to recover,
it is possible to build a new personality in place of the old, codependent one.
It just takes time, and maybe a little luck.
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