I’m collateral damage, unfortunately.
A chapter from my first book. This is how the relationship ended just three days after he returned to Spain. After a weekend in which he had spent two days in a “Breakthrough Transformation Coaching” with an NLP, Hypnotherapist Transformation Coach. The words “collateral damage” is how Philip referred to me after the way he had ended our relationship.
From the book:
Phillip arrived in Spain to be with me on the 25th of August 2020. Every time he returned to the villa I would spend two days preparing the property for his return. I would go through every room in turn making sure it was clean and tidy and dust-free. I also made sure that there were plenty of his favourite foods in the fridge and the cupboards. Oh, and ensure that there were at least two or three bottles of whiskey and that the wine rack was stocked up with his favourite Jumilla wines that he said he liked.
Driving to the airport in Alicante is a one-and-a-half-hour journey, a three-hour round trip for me. I would always feel excited that we would be together again. I had packed him a picnic and a chilled vodka and tonic for the journey home. I always put a little something together for him for the journey back from the airport.
He had spent the previous weekend, the 21st to the 24th of August in Bridge County, or so I was told. He had booked and was undergoing a “breakthrough transformation weekend” with an ex-GP who is an NLP transformation coach. This was meant to be a 2-day session over the weekend to help him transform his health and reduce back pain, which he experienced throughout his life, from an injury he received when he was in his twenties. That weekend, on Saturday the 22nd of August he told me the transformation coaching had been difficult, and he had been a bit tearful. Later he told me he was feeling a “bit shaken up, to be honest.” On day 2, he continued through the session and on Sunday he was telling me he had “shifted something deep” he was still processing everything and said to me ” I know that I can get healthy again, it needs work”.
He was apparently looking forward to seeing me telling me that he was excited and that we have so much to talk about. When we meet in the airport car park he does look different somehow, a little more energetic perhaps, anyway I thought he looked different and healthier perhaps. He was talking about what he had experienced in the coaching over the weekend as I was concentrating on driving home.
Help for his health problems
On the 26th of August, he wanted the day for just the two of us. Because he wanted to talk about his weekend experience again. He had sought help for his health problems, his arthritis in his back and his shoulder, his Crohn’s disease and other ailments, he told me that on the first day the female practitioner, an NLP hypnotherapist apparently couldn’t get through to him and was going to call an end to the therapy session.
He told the therapist that he wanted to continue and so she did, apparently gaining some breakthrough after quite some time on the first day.
He wrote to me in a text message that night and told me that it was all quite emotional. It had made him cry and he had shifted something deep.
After the end of the first-day session, back in the hotel that he said he’d booked, he told me he was unwell. He said that he had purged himself. He was quite ill with vomiting and diarrhoea at the same time he became somewhat disorientated. When this episode calmed down he explained to me how he heard voices in his head, voices that were saying to him, “Phillip you know this, you know this.”
I thought it was all very bizarre.
Something in the back of my mind was saying to me that I wonder if he had been given some form of drug in the session that he didn’t know about. After all, the therapist had been a GP. Perhaps that was why he had had such a reaction.
Anyway, he was now telling me that he felt better than he ever had before and his back and shoulder pain from arthritis was not a problem anymore. He also thought that I could benefit from the coaching, and offered to pay for a weekend therapy session. He described how he could fly us both back to the UK, book a hotel, hire a car, and he would be there for me, so I could transform my life and find the success in business that I had always wanted. I just sat there thinking, a bit bewildered, WHY? I had listened to everything that he had said about the weekend but had an odd intuitive feeling that something was not right.
The abrupt termination, the 27th of August.
We were entertaining friends later in the day. I was going shopping, and before I left I gave Phillip a hug and a kiss and said as he was now a new man, perhaps we could get back to making love again.
He had experienced some difficulty in this department over the previous six months, his ill health being a factor. He had told me he had a slightly enlarged prostate, he also experienced an episode of Crohn’s disease, that had flared up before he had left Spain for the UK in July. Phillip had even purchased some “new man tablets” but even then due to his miscommunication between us, things didn’t work out as planned. Like him taking a pill and then me not knowing he had done so, anyway back to the 27th.
We had invited a couple of friends to spend the evening with us, they were over from the UK on holiday. So the four of us had spent a few hours together, eating and drinking and talking. Phillip had asked me to sit on his knee and of course to give him a kiss. We had even talked about our plans for planting more oleander around the perimeter of the driveway behind the Washington Palms.
Let’s have a nightcap
After our friends had left Phillip had said, “Let’s have a nightcap and sit in the comfy chairs on the porch”. So after tidying away and preparing the drinks, we sat down on the winged-backed armchairs, then he said to me “I’ve got something to tell you” so I’m thinking, here we go, I knew it, that little voice in my head, (Flashback to December 2017) Phillip then said, “I’m in love with another woman, we can remain friends if you want to remain friends, we just can’t have sex anymore” just like that.
He explained, he still loved me and that we could remain friends.
Red flag – wanting to remain friends with an ex keeping you in a web so he can wind you back in any time he needs an ego boost or what is termed narcissistic supply, excessive need for attention or admiration.
Why did I not react?
Well, what would you do? Hit him with something? Slap him in the face? Kick him where it hurts?
I didn’t do any of those things. I walked away and went into the kitchen. I was angry, I was annoyed, I was in shock, I threw my phone down onto the glass table and it bounced onto the floor and I thought to myself, no don’t break that, you need it. I walked through to the lounge and into the bedroom and once I was in the bedroom I shouted out three times, “You bastard, you fucking bastard”. I then returned to the lounge, where he was now sitting on the sofa, there were no tears.
This was not the first time that Phillip had arrived in Spain and announced his infidelity to me as if I didn’t matter, as if my emotional well-being was something he could trample all over.
This time he had reconnected with a woman from nearly forty years in his past, her name is Delia, a
woman he spent a few years with when he was in his twenties when he lived in Poole in Dorset. I knew of this relationship because Phillip had talked to me about his various ex-girlfriends or love affairs. When we had first met, he had even confessed that he had been a serial adulterer throughout his marriage to his long-term wife. Delia had predated this marriage.
Repeating mistakes of the past
After his confession, we continued to talk. At first, I was annoyed and told Phillip that it was finished between us. I had vowed to myself that if he was ever unfaithful again that it would be the end. I was not willing to stand by and be disrespected again, to wait while he carried on an affair with another woman. I said to him in frustration, just pay off my mortgage and let me stay here, or smash all the dreams, sell the house and provide me with half of the value.
After calming down a little, I talked through the various life experiences of my past and explained to Phillip how I thought that he was repeating mistakes of his past.
His persona of the serial adulterer was still with him, little did I know the true persona of the man I had spent eleven years with. He was in a pattern of repeating the mistakes of his past. I realised afterwards that I too was in a repeating pattern and I had attracted another toxic abusive man and relationship into my life. Read another article – Three D’s in Relationship Endings
The “dominoes are suspended”
That night after his unexpected confession and abrupt termination of our relationship, while I was talking to him and going over my past life experiences, I remember telling him that I thought he had thrown a whole box of dominoes up in the air, now those dominoes were suspended above us and neither of us knew where those dominoes would start to fall, and what damage they would do. I would very soon find out.
Listen to Tired of Waiting For You – The Kinks (28th /29th August 2020)
His way or no way at all
His Dear Loren letter. 29th August
(He wanted to give me some figures to consider)
So just two days after the unexpected termination of the relationship, less than a week since his “transformation breakthrough” coaching, Phillip had made some huge life-changing decisions not just for him but decisions that also involved me. He was going to sell his UK property and his Spanish property. He was telling me that he wanted to buy another Spanish property in the coastal resort of La Azohia. This was the area we had talked about as an option for where we could move to when the villa got too much for both of us. On the morning of August 29th, I made an arrangement to call the NLP practitioner that he had seen over the weekend before he arrived back in Spain.
I couldn’t make the call where I was so my plan was to drive to a nearby village where I could call in private. Before I was about to leave, I went into the room that doubled as an office, spare bedroom and utility room. Phillip was sitting at the huge glass office desk trying to print out the letter he had written.
Philip pleaded with me to help him. He couldn’t get the printer to work. He was telling me that he wanted me to have some figures before I spoke to anyone. Philip hadn’t even discussed his plans with me, he was writing all the details in a letter which started “Dear Loren”. I just told him to send it in an email.
When I arrive in the next village I am getting ready to make the phone call to Dr Bella, when I check my emails on my mobile phone. Sure enough, Phillip has sent his letter by email. Reading it quickly. I see the words “I know that you have a lot to process at the moment.”
I returned his email with, Thanks but No Thanks, I have a lot to process right now. Then I called the NLP practitioner.
Here is his letter on August 29th:
Dear Loren, I am sorry. My decision to end our relationship is bound to cause distress and I am doing my best to be kind to you. I know that you have a lot to process at the moment so it may be helpful to have some numbers written down to think about. I’ve outlined a financial proposal below which I’d like you to consider. Within this, I very much want to recognise the support you have given me and the hard work you have put into our life together. I am being as generous as I can, whilst leaving me with enough to move forward too.
Here is what I am proposing:
When you move out of Las Zinas, I will gift you 35,000 GBP so you can choose to pay off your mortgage on your Sunderland property, providing you with a regular rental income.
I am willing to help you rent somewhere
I will also help you buy a house in Spain that you can also own outright by gifting you a further 75,000 EURO. I will also pay your removal and legal fees, but the choice of house will be yours. You have been very clear that you want to move on as quickly as possible. There are lots of good houses advertised in the area between 60 and 80K EURO, and as you know it can take as little as six weeks to complete. But if you want to move out straight away, I am willing to help you rent somewhere until you can find and move into a new house. If you’d like to take any furniture from Las Zinas then please feel free to do so.
I would like to count on your support in helping to sell Las Zinas to get the best possible price. This is in the best interest of us both. You will not receive less than half the value of Las Zinas. Should it fetch more than 230K EURO I am prepared to split the excess with you.
I am doing my best to be as considerate as I can to you, I would like you to do the same, especially during the coming time as we untangle our lives together.
If it would help provide you with greater security, we can take this proposal to a notary (on Monday if you want) and have it signed so that you have a legally binding document.
Nothing about this change is easy so thank you for helping to resolve things nicely.
Phillip.
*****
As a survivor of post-separation abuse, I know firsthand the struggles of navigating a broken system. My first book shines a light on the laws that fail women and offers a call to action for much-needed change.
“Post Separation Abuse, Betrayal & Abandonment, What Type Of Man?”
by Loren Keeling
Find it on Amazon and Digital ebook Stores
★☆★ Amazon ★☆★