My former Christian ''friend'' used me, manipulated me, and turned to be a true predator...

[ZenPaladin]

Hey guys. So first off I want to say that I am Dobokdude, but am simply using a new username that I like better. I know it's bee awhile but it's nice to be back!

 

 

Now let me just say this will be a rather long story, as I have to give enough background info for you to understand it, so I highly recommend a drink and something to eat. I want to share this as a cautionary message about how decieving people can be and what they may be hiding under the mask they put on. Also sharing this will also help me, I hope...

So, since I'm a nerd/geek let's start this off Star Wars style: A long time ago in a Californian town in the US of A...

 

 

 

Throughout my life being a person with Asperger's syndrome(a condition on the autistic spectrum) I can act awkward, say awkward things I display intense interest in unconventional things compared to others(martial arts and animated stuff). I may do socially inappropriate things when to me at the moment they seem like not a big deal( People with AS don't pick up well on social cues) Throughout the years I have never made lifelong friends ever really. One is because I have moved several times( about 5 over my life) but also because I could never be real friends with other kids and I did become best friends with someone for awhile but after some awkward inappropriate things I am not proud of that kinda went out the window. I just was not good socially. That combined with my parents horrible relationship and eventual divorce, and some abuse from my old man himself and you'll see why my desire for closeness and acceptance led me to not noticing the red flags

This is where my ''friend'' Simba comes into play. Simba was born in some African country and suffered from abuse during his early childhood but now he lives in the US with his father and stepmother, brothers and sister. Their family was your typical conservative Christian one, voted Republican, regiments and schedules the children followed, and of course fundamentalist beliefs such as creationism, etc. But they weren't the fully crazy Christians either. I hung out with Simba as well as hanging with his younger brothers, almost kinda seeing them as family as ours got to know each other. Aside from doing LEGOs with the younger brothers, me and Simba would play basketball, talk Marvel, DC and Star Wars since he was also a fan and overtime, girls came into the picture. I was 13, he was 14 so yeah not out of the ordinary. However this is where things begin to go south...

 

 

 

 

As we continued to talk about girls, hints of who Simba really was began to show. For one thing, he made comments about my sister, who was 10-11 at the time has always been rather ahead of alot of her peers in terms of her physical development. He said she would be hot when she is older and guys would be after her, and I went along with it because from my perspective this was just typical teenage boy stuff where if you have a sister you remark on her looks. Do keep this in mind as this is important later.

 

 

Aside from that, Simba also would come over to my house when my mother wasn't home, again I thought this was just the normal aspects of being a teen boy I had been missing out on. But he showed his darker side because of his demanding attitude. For example, my mom had some diet cupcakes that me and my sister weren't allowed into, but he still demanded I give him some even though I ended up taking the fall for him. Another time he tried to cook eggs but burned the skillet and I took the fall again. Then one day we were searching for a movie On Demand and he wanted to watch one that had to be rented. When I kept telling him no because our mom doesn't like extra charges on the cable bill, he then got an angry expression on his face and said that I was just trying to control everything and if I was like that girls would just dump me in an instant, which convinced me to rent the movie. In fact, it was rather common for him to threaten to expose my social failures in order for me to get him and his brothers snacks, , even though they were rather well fed at home and it ate up time and my biweekly allowance. He also liked to play up his good looks and athletic physique compared to my skinny but average one.

 

 

Simba actually had me give him him my cell phone so that not only could he texts his friends and the girls he liked but also to text the ones I did we didn't go to the same schools, but somehow he claimed to have known/hung out with the 3 girls I crushed on mainly during my earlier adolescence. The main one would be this girl from my old church who Simba had saw when I invited him to youth group and church trips. I told this girl I liked her twice, but each time she said she didn't feel the same but Simba claimed he had her number and texted her with her saying she wasn't brave enough and that she was playing hard to get. This is where things may seem a bit hard to follow so I will explain:

 

 

Eventually in late 2014 me and my family moved to a different town ~100 miles away. I was still in touch with Simba at the time and one day he demanded I had to get my phone to him(my old town is 50+miles away because the church girl was going through shit that was making her very suicidal, and me talking to her was the only thing that made her feel better(even though she rejected my feelings twice, he claimed she secretly like me). He claimed that I would mess things up, so he was gonna pretend to be me talking to her. I told him I couldn't get there(no money and how would my mom not notice me gone?) and then he pushed saying if I really loved her I would get there. When I couldn't, he said I was ''letting her die, good job'' and when I tried to explain it was out of my hands he texted ''go away you asshole''. But funny thing is, he had recently reprimanded me about how me being so worried about her allegedly bad circumstances was me being unnaturally clingy but now was saying I had to drop everything and somehow travel what was essentially an 100+mile round trip. This put serious doubts in my mind going forward and as you'll see for good reason.

Some time later when my family was visiting my old church we stopped by his house in our old neighborhood. I really felt like I should be talking to this girl if she really did like me, but he kept insisting that I would just mess things up and that's why I needed to give him my phone and he had to pretend to be me. He then said she tried to kill herself over 3 times and one of them was extremely recent because I was ignoring her. The thing is, before I moved I asked if she wanted to keep in touch and she said no as she doesn't really text people. And again, she was at church fine with signs of any scarring or whatever of her supposed attempts on her own life(he claimed she hung herself really tight around the neck and then tried the bathtub suicide by cutting her wrist and bleeding in the water). He said she was in the ICU at some point but this is just ludicrous. If someone is that suicidal, they'd be in some kind of mental health care and a serious investigation. I know because my sister went through something similar last year. But he claimed that doing this was the only way to save her. Now before we had gotten caught about me giving him his phone because my morning alarm had went off and woke up his parents. Well seems history repeats itself because it apparently happened again when his parents called my mom, and apparently somehow my phone got broken in the process. After that I didn't visit him again or hear from him for quite some time. But over time, I became glad because really the doubts had been building up, and seeing the all the contradictions in the claims he made, how he treated me and so on all but convinced me I was being used. Over the course of the following years of me being in high school he tried to reach out to me about 2-3 times but I had basically said I felt it best if things ended to one effect or the other. But after this past summer, I'm afraid the story doesn't end there...

 

 

As mentioned before, I grew up witnessing massive dysfunction between my parents and that influenced me and my sister's dynamic as we had our fair share of arguments even though we ultimately love each other. But during this past summer, we were having another argument and to avoid conflict I shut my bedroom door and then my sister put holes in the door by hitting it with out toilet paper holder. When my mom got home and began reprimanding her about it as well as her other outbursts(2 of which were her being suicidal) she then started to break down crying even more, like really bawling her eyes out and shaking and then said that during one of the times I had Simba over, I guess I was preoccupied with something and he shoved her up against the wall and molested her.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I mean, quite a long time ago she had actually joked that Simba had done something to her I didn't want to know about, but she had said it so sarcastically I didn't think she meant it. But now here she was, crying so hard she was slapping away my mother's attempts to console her. My father was pissed, and was initially upset at me for having him in the house but it didn't stick long. My dad wanted to file a police report but my mother ended up contacting a crisis lace and now a few months later nothing has come of it. Me, I actually broke down crying because of everything I felt at that time. Betrayal because I had actually thought of him as the brother I never had once, Sadness at how the little sembleance of a normal teenage experience was all fake, guilt over letting him be near my sister and not noticing all the signs and horror at the fact that he was a much darker person than I expected.

 

 

 

The other day, I was looking through one of my secondary email accounts and saw that months ago in February Simba had tried to add me on Linkedlin. That's when I decided to send an email, calling him out for all his schemes, lies, bullshit and especially what he did to my sister. I told him he was sick and I was stupid to ever listen to him and I never wanted to speak or hear from him again. Later on, he then texted me saying that he was never alone with or touched my sister and that he would get his pastor involved and call the police for me making up lies. He also threatened to expose me for the stuff with girls and the fetish videos I had looked at at that age because it was ''sickening that I though of yourself as a saint'' as he put it. I then said I wasn't gonna tell anyone because it wouldn't do any good. I mean as sad as it is, this happened years ago and any physical evidence would be long gone.

 

 

After I had said that he then said God wants us all to forgive(he doesn't know I was a Buddhist now) and that I was bringing up stuff from the past and that he forgave himself and me and that he has nothing but love for me as a brother. He then said that he would call me later for a man to man talk and then said if not that was fine but that he wishes me well and hopes God stirs something in me. I said there was no need for that and said goodbye.

 

 

Honestly, that conversation was rather scary looking back. Because having shared this with someone who had an abusive upbringing and doing some digging into the mentality of abusers, this just further confirmed my fears. I mean, the gist of what I said in the email was calling him out on everything and telling him never to contact me again, but I didn't say I was telling anyone or even told him that my parents knew. And yet straight from the get go he threatened and blackmailed me, said I couldn't accuse him because of my own flaws and then starts talking about forgiveness even though he claims he never lied about anything or did anything to my sister. And there's the fact he claimed to still see me as a brother and wishes me the best but yet he had just threatened to call the police and blackmailed me for simply bringing this up. And then there was pulling all this shit about being some kind of God-fearing Christian man and really going for an appeal to emotion with the ''God wants forgiveness'' and stuff and how he hopes something is ''stirred in me.'' Please. And the sad thing is there are alot of people like him out there. Who decieve and hurt others while wearing a holy mask. It's disgusting.

 

 

Recently, I've discussed this with my therapist(thank you community college health fee) who made a mandated report on it. He did say that there is no certainty that anything will happen, but that the authorities may look into it. My family doesn't know I'm in therapy(felt no need to tell them plus alot of the therapy has to do with the dysfunctional family shit) and right now there has been some kind of investigation into what might have happened between my sister and a boy she met at school(unrelated incident). Only time will tell what's to come...

 

 

So, to my ex-friend ''Simba'', I seriously hope that if you are still up to your games, you eventually get caught and get what you deserve and that you aren't able to do to any girl what you've done to my sister nor will anyone else be decieved by you like I was. You are certainly no kind of good Christian, or any kind for that matter. You're just as bad as one of these pervert priests or the worst scum and villainy. You are a truly sick and conning bastard, so unless it's seeing you getting your just-desserts in a court of law, let's NEVER, EVER, meet again...

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Sounds like a narcissist using religion as a cover for his abusive nature. Very common, unfortunately. He'll always blame it on someone else, whether the victims or claiming he was victimized and can't help it. 

 

[◊ Weezer ◊]

I agree with Fuego.  Do everything you can to avoid any further contact with him, and report it if he makes any threats.  Continue therapy sessions as long as needed, and HANG IN THERE!  Let us know how it goes.

[ZenPaladin]

3 hours ago, Fuego said:

Sounds like a narcissist using religion as a cover for his abusive nature. Very common, unfortunately. He'll always blame it on someone else, whether the victims or claiming he was victimized and can't help it. 

 

For sure that's what he is. If only I could have seen the signs sooner. But I was young, naive and desperate for some comfort in such a rough period of my life.

[ZenPaladin]

2 hours ago, Weezer said:

I agree with Fuego.  Do everything you can to avoid any further contact with him, and report it if he makes any threats.  Continue therapy sessions as long as needed, and HANG IN THERE!  Let us know how it goes.

Thank you, that is the plan. I saved the screenshots of the texts just in case. I appreciate your kind words and definitely plan on posting more. I wouldn't mind PMing you later just to talk.

[TruthSeeker0]

Yup, a narcissist, that's pretty typical and there's a lot of "Christian" ones out there. I have one in my extended family and it's always everyone else, never her, that's at fault. The more distance, the less contact you get with such people the better. I had to read several books on narcissists to learn how to deal with it. 

I hope therapy is helping you, it sounds like it is. 

[DanForsman]

Hi ZenPaladin. Glad that you are back and doing therapy to improve your life. Zimba is a taker and doesn't seem to have ever been capable of being a friend worth having. I'm sorry you got into that relationship when you were too young and inexperienced to realize what was happening but good for you to have started looking out for yourself. Stay on this good path you are now traveling down and I'm sure your future will be much brighter. I'm sorry for all the trouble you're going through but really glad to hear your doing what you can to protect yourself from Zimba.

[ZenPaladin]

11 hours ago, DanForsman said:

Hi ZenPaladin. Glad that you are back and doing therapy to improve your life. Zimba is a taker and doesn't seem to have ever been capable of being a friend worth having. I'm sorry you got into that relationship when you were too young and inexperienced to realize what was happening but good for you to have started looking out for yourself. Stay on this good path you are now traveling down and I'm sure your future will be much brighter. I'm sorry for all the trouble you're going through but really glad to hear your doing what you can to protect yourself from Zimba.

Thank you for your kind words Dan. It is not easy but hopefully things will be better one step at a time.

[◊ DestinyTurtle ◊]

Hello @ZenPaladin. I'm really sorry you had to go through that. I had a similar experience back in the day with someone (who of course) was a very vocal Xian, and wouldn't shut up about "forgiveness" when he has no intent on stopping the abusive behavior (man looking back he had this sh*tty grin on his face every time people forgave him - he must have thought of everyone are such huge suckers). Anyways, I won't bore you with the details but he's dead now (no I did not kill him). He very much deserved the way he ended, but it did not undo the damage he did to people in his life. 

 

Stay strong and take time to heal.