Sad but True

When I was first diagnosed with chronic Lyme, I was reading someone else’s story about how the illness destroyed her relationship and that her partner wasn’t supportive. I remember thinking, “Omg… that’s crazy. Thank goodness that will never happen to me with the person I’m with!” But it did.

While there are countless examples I could share, I’m choosing to include only a handful of moments from over the years that revealed the person I thought I knew was not who they claimed to be. When life brought challenges that called for compassion and steadiness, neither was there …which showed me they had far less emotional and mental maturity than I originally believed. These are behaviors to watch for, especially during illness, and it’s important to remember that these patterns not only show up in romantic relationships - they can also appear in friendships, family dynamics, and even the workplace.

What I Couldn’t See Clearly Yet

I had been living in a negative environment, and in a toxic relationship where I did not feel safe, cared for, or even cared about in the slightest. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. It was rainbows and sunshine for awhile, like so many new relationships. My partner was Prince Charming, and I had no doubts about entering the relationship and taking on the role of raising two young children full-time, ages 4 and 8, while building a life and family together, since their biological mother was out of the picture.

Growing up, my parents showed me that when times got tough, you worked together as a team and came out stronger on the other side. But that was not the case with my partner, I learned, once “real life” started happening. His idea of working through problems was to bury his head in the sand, thinking the issues would resolve themselves or disappear if he just ignored them. He would not communicate his true feelings to me, would hold things in, and then resent me for them, as he later admitted was “how he operates.” I guess we didn’t really stand a chance when someone has already made up their mind and resentment just starts compounding on things you didn’t even know were a problem.

By then, though, we were already years into the relationship, bonds with the children had been formed, and it wasn’t always bad either. In fact, it was really good a lot of the time. That made it much harder to see things clearly, because the good moments and what I believed was a deep love and connection kept me rationalizing his behavior and made it difficult to recognize how unhealthy things had become.

There came a point when I asked my partner if we could have a cleaning service come in once a month, or even once a quarter, just to handle the deep-cleaning type of tasks to help us both out, and because of how physically bad I felt. He refused, or rather, he said he would think about it, and then every time I brought it up after that, it was always, “I’ll think about it.”

When you cannot even get practical support for something as basic as house cleaning, especially when he had the financial means to easily do it, and knew how physically unwell I was, it is another form of dismissal - another way of saying your suffering is not important enough to respond to.

And yet, the very week after I moved out of that house after eight years he hired a weekly cleaning service! Like, who does that!?

The Message That Became the Ongoing Narrative

My partner told me from the beginning of our relationship that “it’s all about the kids,” which initially I understood that, of course, the kids need stability and they need to be kept safe so our focus is of course on raising the kids right. However, I found that what that statement really meant was that anything that might upset me or hurt my feelings, I was consistently told, “it’s not about you, it’s about the kids.” What he was really saying, over and over again, was that I did not matter.

That kind of messaging is often how toxic relationships slowly erode your self-worth, and it becomes especially important to recognize when you are already facing something as life-altering as a chronic illness diagnosis. Being repeatedly told that your feelings do not matter can make you doubt your own worth, suppress your emotions, and disconnect from your inner voice just to keep the peace.

The Diagnosis and the Distance

When I finally got the Lyme diagnosis, my partner wouldn’t even Google what it was or do the slightest bit of research. To say I was taken aback is an understatement. At that point, we were engaged, so of course the words “in sickness and in health” came to mind.

I recall thinking, geez, here I had been raising the children for years - children with their own emotional and behavioral challenges that I’d actively been helping from the beginning. I had spent years in court battles with him and his ex-wife, the kids’ biological mother, supporting him, putting together timelines and evidence for the lawyers myself - helping keep the children safe, and preventing further psychological harm. I gave everything I could to the household: teaching the kids morals and values, providing them much needed structure, and creating routines, helping with homework, making sure they went to bed on time, making sure they ate healthy meals instead of candy all day, getting them outside and active instead of on their electronics 24/7, homeschooling them during COVID, having them get into extracurricular activities at school to expand their interests and build social bonds, and planning summer camps, trips, and activities, just to name a few.

And yet, when I needed someone to rally around me, he wasn’t there. Not bothering to learn about a serious illness is dismissive, isolating, and deeply invalidating as a human being, let alone from your supposed life partner and fiancé. It was another message that I didn’t matter.

Watching My Decline

What makes this illness so hard is that it can be largely invisible to the outside world. But when someone has known you for years when you were well, healthy, and fully yourself, they should be able to see that something this devastating is not “you” - it’s something happening outside of your control. My partner saw my despair, fear, and confusion yet I truly believe he thought I was faking or exaggerating it, and he dismissed my treatments and protocols as “woo-woo” because, in his mind, I should just be able to go to a PCP to get a round of antibiotics and be cured.

He watched me deteriorate in front of him. He watched as I had to stop going to 24 Hour Fitness, then watched me hold onto yoga class as long as I could because it was lower intensity, until I eventually had to let that go too. I was already uncomfortable in my body after gaining 35 pounds, and even a few minutes on the elliptical machine at home would leave me wiped out. So I bought a rowing machine, thinking that if I could at least sit down, maybe I could still get some movement in since I could not stand for long. My partner’s response was that it was “just another expensive machine that would end up collecting dust and taking up space.”

Instead of doing everything in his power to help and support me, he was kicking me while I was down. Comments like these may seem small in the moment, but they are insidious, and over time they can have a huge impact on someone’s mental and emotional wellbeing.

Sabotage Around Healing

There were times when my efforts to get my diet under control, especially by eliminating gluten to help with the autoimmune responses I was experiencing, were met with sabotage. I love baked goods (basically gluten and sugar) so it was already a challenge to stay away from them when they were constantly around me in the house. I was telling my partner it might be good for all of us to reduce the amount of gluten and sugar we were consuming, at least to some degree, but he refused and got angry at the suggestion. “I’m not taking sugar away from the kids!” he said (which wasn’t even what I was saying…), and after that conversation, he went to Costco and came home with more gluten and sugar than I had ever seen in one shopping trip before - croissants, chocolate chip cookies, Madeleine cookies, blueberry muffins, chocolate muffins, an apple pie, bagels, you name it - enough to cover our entire kitchen buffet counter end to end.

As I previously shared about turning to alcohol to numb the physical pain and my emotions, it had gotten to a point where I really needed to pull in the reins because it was wreaking further damage to my body. My partner was not a big drinker and, as he said, he did not like to “lose control.” He might have an occasional Old Fashioned, sometimes going a couple weeks without even one. So I asked if we could remove the alcohol from the house, even temporarily, so I could get a handle on things. Instead of recognizing how brave it was that I could see this was a problem and admit I needed help, he got mad because what about him? He liked to have a drink from time to time. In other words, he was willing to risk what I was dealing with every day in my condition rather than give up his occasional drink at home for a while. After a fight, he moved the liquor bottles into our bedroom closet - as if that is going to stop someone? Ok, I’ll just walk 10 more feet to get them from the closet instead of the kitchen cabinet.

Mold in the Home

After I found out I had mold toxicity in my body, we had the house tested, and sure enough, toxic mold was found. That led to yet another fight because I used a company recommended by my functional medicine doctor that used proper, non-toxic remediation methods, which my partner thought was “woo-woo.” Even with lab work from an independent company showing the levels of toxicity, he was convinced he was being taken for a ride and that the whole thing was a scam. He reluctantly agreed to have the house remediated, which you think someone would do willingly, considering him and our two young children were living in that toxicity too.

It’s important to note that before all of this, our son had developed asthma while living in that house, to the point where we had to get him inhalers from the doctor. Once the toxic mold was remediated from the house, his asthma magically disappeared. Yet there was no acknowledgement of that from my partner. It was just another instance of making me feel like what we were doing was stupid and a scam. It really didn’t matter what the topic was - that was the messaging and energy he brought into the home.

When COVID Brought Out the Worst

When COVID hit, my partner began struggling in his own way, in part because he could no longer meet clients for lunch or happy hour the way he used to. We also had to pull the plug on a business venture, which was entirely a result of the pandemic, and in no way my fault, but that did not stop him from turning cold toward me. He started looking at me with pure disgust and would barely engage with me at all. It felt as though he blamed me for everything, even for the fact that he was stuck at home, despite the reality that the entire world was under the same restrictions. He was hot and cold, dismissive, and angry much of the time.

I don’t know whether he truly could not stand me or whether he was projecting his own mental struggles onto me, but that kind of negative energy can be felt a mile away. I was walking on eggshells in my own home for years. This causes the body to stay on high alert, the immune system is further strained, and you’re left feeling isolated, devalued, and drained.

When you are trying to heal, the energy around you matters. A toxic relationship can make it harder for the body to rest, repair, and recover because you are not only dealing with an illness - you’re also carrying the weight of constant emotional stress.

When Hope Finally Fractured

Although it was clear to me by this time who my partner truly was in the way he chose to treat me, I was too sick to add moving out and starting over to the list of things I was dealing with at that time. So I kept pushing forward, putting enormous pressure on myself to heal, all while holding onto hope that if I got better, maybe we’d go back to the way we were before.

At one point, while I was advocating for us to have time together as a couple and go out and do something, he replied that the only time we’d be together was if we were going on a trip. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how much of that I accepted, but at the time I kept making excuses for him. We were already dealing with so much with raising kids, his deranged ex-wife, and life in general, so I told myself he had spoken in haste or didn’t really mean it. But over the years, the pattern became impossible to ignore. It became that I was the only one planning things for us beyond typical dinners out or get-togethers that friends had organized themselves. Big trips, small getaways, concerts, comedy shows, local events — if I didn’t find it and plan it, it didn’t happen.

I remember putting together a quick Valentine’s weekend getaway to the mountains even though I felt incredibly unwell at the time. At the end of the trip, he posted about it on social media without tagging me or mentioning me anywhere. I’m not usually one who cares much about social media, but after the effort I had put into creating time away for us, it was just one more example of his intentional cruelty towards me, and that I didn’t matter.

I can hear y’all now. I know. I could write a whole book about this, but the truth is I’m more angry and embarrassed with myself for staying with someone like this for so long. I stayed for a couple reasons initially, but my main concern was the children, as I did not want them to have to deal with yet another broken home. But by the end, it was clear that my own self-worth and survival were hanging by a thread, and I had no choice but to finally choose myself. The lesson, though painful, was clear: people can tell you who they are all day long, but who they really are is revealed through their actions.

Rewriting the Truth

What I had no way of knowing was that the negativity would not end when the relationship did. Unfortunately, my ex-partner started telling lies about me to the children, family, and friends. We had always been careful not to speak poorly about the children’s biological mother - the woman who abandoned them and then selfishly continued to cause psychological harm, so I never thought in a million years he would do something like this to me; the woman who stepped up to raise the children as her own and who did everything in her power to ensure they grew up to be as healthy, happy and well-rounded as they could be.

He told everyone that I “didn’t like to do anything” as the reason we broke up. To be clear, I was the one who ended the relationship, but being painted as lazy or boring when what was really happening was that I was sick and struggling is deeply painful. It doesn’t just misrepresent the situation; it attacks your character. The truth is that I spent our entire relationship fighting for us as a couple and for our time to do things together. Early on, I not only had a full-time job, but I was also building my own product and business, attending weekly women’s business groups, going to entrepreneur meetups and startup events, working out three to four times a week, traveling, and still making time to go out and have fun with friends. That really sounds like someone who “doesn’t do anything”, right? Like any mother, I prioritized the children during those formative years, so some of those things naturally fell to the wayside. Then Lyme disease hit, and it became even harder to be the same version of myself I had been up to that point. But I think I’ve made it clear that the only times we did anything beyond our usual routines was a result of my planning them - whether for my partner and me, the kids, or all of us as a family. So hearing that I “didn’t like to do anything” is not just untrue, it’s absurd.

Unfortunately, I also learned the children were being placed in the middle in subtle but deeply damaging ways - being encouraged to keep things from me, to stay quiet, and to protect versions of events that were not true. That kind of dynamic is especially painful because it does not just distort the truth; it teaches children that honesty is conditional and that love must be tied to secrecy and loyalty. In the same way, there were comments from him framed as positive that carried a very different message underneath. The children are repeatedly told, “See, aren’t I so much better now?” with the implication that this improvement existed because he was no longer with me and was now with someone else. On the surface, that may sound harmless, but underneath it sends a damaging message to the children about who I am, and how they should view his newest partner. It’s another way of shaping a narrative without saying it outright - positioning himself in the best possible light while quietly diminishing me in the process.

While I can share countless examples of his lies, the point is that these are all traits of a cruel and toxic person - rewriting the narrative, controlling the story, and playing the victim. It’s clear he cares more about how he looks to other people than about being honest, even if that means tearing me down in the process and making me look like the boring, difficult one. In the end, it’s a way for him to avoid responsibility, deny my illness, and shift the blame so he would not have to deal with his own part in the relationship failing.

The Mask is Off

When you’re so sick you can barely climb stairs, hold a hair dryer up, or remember where the cups are in a house you’ve lived in for years, you’re already fighting a scary battle on your own. And when the one person who is supposed to have your back and offer safety and support, instead sabotages you, adds stress, is intentionally mean, and abandons you, it pushes the body even further into dysregulation. That kind of betrayal made healing impossible, because healing requires safety - and safety clearly was not there.

The truth is, some people simply do not care what you are going through when it requires care, concern, or effort beyond what is convenient for them. They are willing to love you only until it asks more of them or starts cramping their style. All I know is that my ex-partner proposed to me right before I got really sick, and then didn’t want to marry me pretty soon thereafter when things went downhill with my health. I mean, he even told me at one point that he wished he’d never proposed …while we were engaged! Again, like… who says that to someone!?

The irony of all this is that, very early on - maybe our third date or so - I had to go to the ER for something super quick and acute. I didn’t want him in the room with me because what had happened was embarrassing. He said to me, “Look, this relationship isn’t going to work if you don’t let me take care of you.” I remember being taken aback, thinking, wow - what a true man - someone fully invested and grounded in what really matters in life.

In the end, he was just a wolf in sheep’s clothing; the person behind closed doors told a very different story than what the outside world got.

When Even Basic Help Was Withheld