S1:E17: No One Believes You When Your Ex Stalks You

The title says it all in this episode. I ran into my ex at my first half-marathon race in the fall of 2019, believing it was a coincidence when eventually I found out it wasn't.

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Mental Breakthrough, a memoir podcast about owning our most vulnerable stories so we can live a life of authenticity.

I’m Maryann Samreth, the woman behind the pen name, Sincerely Miss Mary. Together, I take you through my healing journey as I share stories of moving through pain to get to the other side where the light shines again.

In this season, I carry you moment to moment, starting with a tumultuous breakup, then multiple breakdowns, and eventually a breakthrough.

I share stories of how my gift of writing guided me through the darkest moments of my life, leading me to reconnect with my Cambodian ancestors and break the cycle of generational trauma.

There is power in storytelling and sharing our vulnerabilities with the world. It opens doors to cultivate deeper connections with others on the same journey so we can heal as a collective.

By sharing my truths, I pave the way for others to feel safe sharing theirs. We all have a story to tell. Stories that can be someone’s silver lining. Stories of hope.

Episode Intro:
The title says it all in this episode. This was a very terrifying experience for me when I discovered the truth of what I was experiencing.

What was painful when uncovering the stalking was the majority of people in my life invalidated what happened or didn’t believe me. People told me I was over-sensitive and over-exaggerating. I felt very invisible during this time.

I hope this episode can educate you on the importance of a woman’s intuition and how we should always believe them

Episode 17

They say when someone makes your body tremble, it’s because they are someone that triggered a trauma response in your life. Someone that made you feel so overwhelmed your cortisol levels floods your sytem.

This person who caused me prolonged trauma was my ex and the trauma responses that was activated in my system was going into freeze and fawn mode interchangeably.

If you’re not familiar with fawning, it’s when you befriend the perpetrator in order to protect yourself.

This looks like people pleasing and being complicit…which was my exact behavior throughout my abusive relationship.

After our tumultuous breakup in the summer of 2019, followed by the rejection of his friends and family from condemning his best friend for sexually assaulting which I talk about in episode and after finding out he moved on within weeks to another woman who I later found out he cheated on me with which I talk about in last week’s episode…

I made it my mission to go no-contact with him so I could heal.

It was difficult to go from speaking to someone every day for 5 years, to being strangers…but I knew for my mental health…and the series of rejection afterwards…I needed to get away from him.

No contact is the best thing you can do when you are trauma bonded to an abuser with high narcissistic traits.

Trauma bond means to develop an emotional bond with the abuser because of the cycle of lows and highs that creates a conditioning of punishment followed by reward. It’s an insidious abuse cycle that no one can understand unless you experienced it.

A trauma bond is the reason it’s difficult to leave an abuser.

To help break the trauma bond and heal from the breakup I took up running.

One day I called up Liana, my dear partner in crime who worked with me at Tommy Hilfiger and appears in many episodes of my podcast, and told her I was signing up for the Brooklyn half marathon…

It didn’t take long to convince her to sign up for the race too…and just like that our training and my infatuation with running began.

The most I ever ran before training for this race was 6 miles…and this was several years ago.

The training process was ran parallel to my healing journey from the breakup. It was getting easier with more consistency.

My body was getting stronger, my mind was getting stronger, and the trauma bond began to break as I felt less attached to my abuser…The good memories I held onto to try to excuse his toxic behavior began to fade…leaving me with the truth…

I never belonged to him.

As much as he wanted me to play this game of life with him where he was the puppet master, and I was anything he wanted me to be.

I never belonged to him.

And so, I literally ran through this realization.

I ran through this denial I long carried and broke it.

I returned to myself…to my power..which I always had.

Running is somatic healing.

It connects your mind, body, and spirit.

It reminds you of your potential.

I was limitless and on the day of race in October of 2019, I was flying through every mile all the way to the finish line.

With friends and family by my side and me and Liana celebrating our first half-marathon.

I remember this moment so vividly.

Taking photos and selfies with our medals.

Cheering ourselves in Prospect Park.

We were taking in this moment with our runner’s high…and then it was interrupted by a familiar voice…

“Hey, I didn’t know you ran this too.”

To my horror…It was my ex…and his new girlfriend about 15 feet away, intentionally not looking at me.

My body froze.

Freeze response activated.

He proceeded to pick up our dog, Porpy, who he once also owned.

Porpy barely acknowledged him, because she could sense a narcissist with bad intention from a mile away…and she was not having it.

All of my friends and family also were in shock at what was happening…All I could do was fawn.

“Congrats on your race.” I said “Did you run it with your girlfriend?”

He replied by saying he came here alone…even though she was in eyesight of my direction. I remember thinking…Did he really just lie to my face?

We talked about running and the running groups we were in and I tried my best to be cordial and polite until he walked away from the shocked faces of my friends and family.

Liana finally broke the silence when she said how weird that was and she thought he had stalked me.

She was the first to follow her intuition and let me know that this was not a coincidence. Prospect Park is huge…the chances of running into someone after a race with thousands of new Yorkers was very slim…

I denied it at first, I just thought running the same race was a coincidence because we were together for so long that we had so many similarities…but Liana’s gut was always right… she felt his energy was very off and very toxic…and she knew he was up to no good.

She planted a seed in my head and I ignored until I went on a solo trip to Paris and then saw on social media that my ex also went on vacation the same week with his new girlfriend…

In that moment I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence…THAT was weird…when I got back home Paris, a friend sent me an article about a girl who was cyberstalked by her psycho ex…He hacked into her iphone, emails, social medias, bank accounts and locked everything out…

It freaked me out so I started to change my passwords to my bank account, social medias and my emails just in case..

When I got to changing email…I saw the backup phone number to access my email account was my ex’s number..when I looked at the login history location, I saw various places around Manhattan that I’ve never been to…

Then I looked at my icloud account on my iphone….where you can see your location with the find my iphone feature..and I also saw various logins throughout NYC that was not my doing…and I knew..Liana was right…my ex, who also works in IT at a hedgefund, somehow had access to my emails, iclouds, and dropbox…almost as if he replicated my icloud on another device..which I’m sure he is capable of knowing how to do…

My ex running the half-marathon was no coidicence.. if he had access to my emails..he knew I signed up for the race..if he had access to my icloud he was able to track with the find my iphone feature.

I’ve never felt so violated in my life.

How can a man behave this way, with a new girlfriend? What did he want from me? Wasn’t his new supply enough?

The answer? Power.

He wanted what he couldn’t have.

Me.

I spent a week making a list of all of my online accounts and changing my passwords.

Screenshotting login histories of locations I wasn’t familiar with, his phone number in my email account and creating a folder in my computer called restraining order…just in case.

I began telling more friends about what happened and unfortunately majority of them thought I was crazy or exaggerating. Not many of them believed me

One friend even defended the actions of my ex. It was shocking how many of my friends invalidated or minimized my experiences.

I knew in my body I was right. He stalked me by running the same half-marathon as me. It was crazy but I knew I was right even though I didn’t want to me. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

To the ones who told he lost the best thing that ever happened to him when he dumped me…ironically him stalking me proved them right…and I never wanted to be the worst thing that ever happened to him in my life…

I never wanted him to move on so quickly to his now girlfriend so he would leave me alone. Now I knew that he was truly using this girl to get his revenge on me.

I’m grateful Liana and a select few believed me but it was hurtful for the majority who didn’t.

How many women who have been stalked or harassed get invalidated and then made to feel unsafe for speaking their truths?

Believe women because nothing is stronger than a woman’s intuition.

When I told this story again in my podcast community, a woman sent me a private message saying…that’s what they do… he was trying to disrupt your embodied healing.

I was shocked to read that…she knew this type of person…but how?

This woman, Allie Davis, an Ecofeminist therapist who also has a PHD in developmental trauma in helping woman heal from these types of interpersonal violence explained to me that as I was in my running journey and breaking the trauma bond, my ex was able to sense it energetically and attempted to disrupt it to pull me back on my healing journey and insert his dominance over me by stalking me. This was a power move. He was trying to control me again.

The behavior is far from normal. It’s psychopathic and I’m grateful Allie, who has dedicated most of her career to healing women from perpetrators, validated my experiences.

It’s scary this happens. It can happen to anyone. So please, always believe woman.

To this day, he’ll occasionally creep into my life by stalking and spam-liking my Medium page, Tiktoks, and even trying to add me on Clubhouse.

He’s blocked from everything and at this point it feels like the Wack A Mole Game at a carnival. At first he would make me feel sick. But then eventually I just got annoyed…he was like a mosquito..I no longer feel anything from his attempt to harass me…he doesn’t matter anymore.

He has no power over me…as much as tried to retain it…

I believe the universe allowed for him to come back into my life at the half-marathon to remind me…

How far I’ve come.

How far I’ve grown

How Far I’ve leveled up

Because of him

And will continue to

Away from him

He can never kill my healing vibe.

Outro:
Thank you for listening to this episode. I want to thank all of the people that did believe me during this time and Allie Davis for validating my experience. If you want to work with Allie, her information will be in my shownotes.

She’s a powerful woman who uses storytelling and reclaiming the narrative as part of her healing practice.

If you liked this episode please follow me on Apple podcasts and leave me a review.

You can also follow me on IG and tiktok at Sincerely Miss Mary.
I will talk to you all next week!