How to say 'no' to a stalker

8:44 PM 6/16/10

Several times in my life, I have had to say 'no' to a guy who kept asking me out on dates, calling me on the phone, trying to meet me someplace, and that kind of thing.

There is a right way and a wrong way to say 'no' to the stalker.

The wrong way, a list of things NOT to do: Don't just avoid them. Don't ignore them if they are sending you lots of letters, phone calls, etc. Don't keep being 'nice' to them because you don't want to hurt their feelings. Don't send a rejection through an email.

The right way: Confront the person. Talk to them. Practice what you'll say before you see them, maybe with a friend who will role-play the stalker and pretend to argue with you. Tell them all of the things you want them to stop doing. Remember, they will survive. They've probably been rejected many times before.

Be specific: tell them each and every thing you want them to stop doing. For instance: Don't email me at all anymore, don't email my friends, don't call me on the phone, don't leave messages, don't call my friends and family on the phone, don't call me at work, don't drive by my house, stop asking me out on dates, stop asking me to call you, stop asking me about email. You want to repeat yourself so that they don't go finding 'loopholes' - 'You never told me I couldn't call your MOM and talk to her!'

Assertiveness training helps, but since I learned that from a book, I probably can't summarize it all here. You can do without it.

I had to do it before. The time I remember most clearly was when I was at Shepherd College. I was taking a walk in the 'bad part of town.' Shepherdstown was a small town, but it had a little area where the houses were shabbier and the people were poorer. A guy was sitting on a porch, and he said hello to me. I was friendly and so I stopped and talked to him. He invited me into his house, and I went in and walked around with him (That was really stupid, and I wish I hadn't done that, but I was lucky - nothing happened.). He asked for my phone number, and I gave it to him. I was just being nice, and I didn't know how to say 'no.' It's hard to say 'no' when you're in the middle of a stressful situation, and you don't know what's going on, and you haven't realized yet that this is bad. You have to prepare ahead of time to say 'no,' because it isn't easy.

So he started calling me on the phone over and over again. And I really didn't like him, and there was nothing to talk about. I tolerated a couple of conversations, but felt myself getting bored and irritated and wishing he would leave me alone. He started telling me he loved me, too, yet he barely knew me at all and had only just met me.

So I mentioned this to somebody, like one of the Resident Assistants, and she said to talk to security. (If I recall correctly.) Somebody in the security department knew this guy and told me that he had been convicted of rape, and that he was forbidden to walk on the college campus, because he had done this before.

So I practiced how I would tell him to leave me alone. Then the next time he called me, I told him several times in several different ways that I wasn't interested in him, and that I wanted him to stop calling me on the phone. Every so often, I would stop and say, 'Do you understand?' I felt afraid, annoyed, and angry. If I recall, I had someone with me when I had this conversation with him. This was on the phone.

And he DID stop calling me, after that. It worked.

Why is this important? A couple of reasons. Most people don't like to call the police and have to get someone to go to court or go to jail. They really don't want to have to do that. I don't, and most other people don't want to either, especially if you SORT OF like someone, or feel sorry for them, or you used to like them for real, a long time ago, and they used to be your friend, until something went wrong.

Second, I am an anarchist (formerly a libertarian). That means that I reject the existing government, and I believe that however we govern ourselves it should be drastically different from the government we have now. This is another reason why I would rather not get the police and the courts involved in personal situations. Calling on the government for help should be a last resort, which means that you have to deal with a problem yourself if possible. There are so many things that go wrong when you call on the government for help.

The most likely situation with my co-worker is: Nicole used to be a friend, and I felt sorry for her, but she started saying and doing things that were creepy/strange/freaked me out/etc, and going too far, so I had to tell her to stop, and leave me alone. That probably describes the real world situation.

Chances are that he's afraid of me because I am 'mentally ill.' He thinks that I am dangerous or mentally unstable, because I hear voices and because the voices tell me to do things. I've told him this, because I wanted him to know about it right away as soon as we started becoming friends and getting to know each other. So he thinks that if he rejects me, I might attack him or get revenge or do something crazy and dangerous.

And actually, what I will do in reality is this: I will cry, I will scream (alone, in my car), I will be heartbroken and devastated and humiliated, and I will avoid him for a while. I won't be able to look at him. I won't make eye contact. I will feel physical pain in my chest as though my heart has been hurt for real, and I know, because this already happened whenever we had the text message incident, the one time when the text messages told me to leave him alone, but then I saw him in person afterwards and he was anxious and he asked me if I had a note for him. That is what happened that time. I was devastated and crushed. But I didn't get angry and I didn't get vengeful, and I didn't sit there thinking of ways to get back at him or attack him or anything like that. I just grieved, horribly, in terrible pain for hours. And I couldn't look at him when I saw him again. (And on that day, he was anxious, and he kept doing little things to talk to me, comfort me, and get my attention, and make me laugh - it became clear that whatever the text message said, it wasn't from him - I remember. There was a drastic, obvious difference between the way he was acting in the real world, versus what the text message said.)

So, he can say 'no' to me if he needs to, and I need to know what not to do. I tried sending him an email on MySpace after I got the 'rejection' email, and I said, 'please talk to me in person and tell me what you want me to do,' and that's when he de-friended me and didn't reply to the email and I couldn't get any more replies at all from him, and didn't get an answer to my friend request when I tried to do that again.

I remind myself of what he said the other day. I said, 'Did you actually send me that email on MySpace? It said something that was... not very nice.' (That's an understatement, but I really didn't have time to get into detail of what exactly was said, and I don't know if I could have made myself speak the words out loud without choking up.) He said, 'MySpace? I've been using Facebook. I haven't been on MySpace in like, months.' (That seems strange, because his profile page keeps getting logged into, every couple days. There is a place where it says 'last login,' and he keeps logging in. There was an activity stream where he kept marrying Carrie in various different cities - in San Francisco, Las Vegas, etc. - you know how you can do these little games and apps and stuff.) That's when I felt like he was lying to me, and I said, 'Don't worry about it... don't worry about it,' and I walked away.

I was friends with his MySpace profile for a couple of days, and I saw the things on his page. It's a private profile, so I couldn't see those things unless I really was his friend (or if I was hacking into his account, which I'm not). He had photos of him and some people climbing up to the cave in the woods. We talked about that cave one time. I told him I was interested in going into caves because I wanted to... (unable to speak, how do I explain this to him?...), well, because I have some strange problems (gesturing to my head, if I recall correctly) and I actually hear voices, and I went to a mental hospital a few years ago... and I wanted to know if the stuff would still happen if I went inside a cave...

I had tried to explain to him the truth, that day, and it was impossible to talk, and I was scared and excited. We were standing by the soup bar. So I said I was looking for caves because I wanted to test and see if the stuff would still happen to me if I was inside a cave. He told me where the cave was, but he said it would be easier if he showed it to me, because it was hard to explain. I felt immediately that I couldn't say yes to this, and I couldn't go any further, I couldn't make it real - I couldn't say, 'Okay, meet me next Tuesday and I'll follow your car,' - I couldn't do that - that would be too much, too exciting and overwhelming. I could not take a walk alone in the woods with him. I would want to be close to him and I would want to touch him. I wouldn't be interested in going to the cave just to try my cave experiment. I would be going there just to spend time alone with him. And how big was this cave? Could two people go into it at the same time? Is this something that would force us to be physically close together in a small place? That was unthinkable, I couldn't do that. So it would be like telling a lie, deceiving him, pretending I wanted to see the cave when I actually wanted to be with him. So, I said nothing - he said he could show me where it was, but I didn't take him up on it. He said it was called the Eagle's Nest.

And after that, he started calling me his flattering nickname. We had intimacy, closeness, and trust, and I was vulnerable, and I told him about my weakness, my strange problem, and when I opened up to him, he trusted me more and he began calling me the nice nickname. It was because of that day, that conversation, about the caves. That's when the nickname started.

So I saw the photos of him going up to the cave with some people, friends or family, I don't know. He fell down a hill and was sliding, sitting down, and the caption said, 'Just watching Curt fall... damn if he hadn't caught that tree,' and the next picture showed him catching onto a tree on the hill (Actually, I'm confused, that might have been on his friend's myspace page, now that I think about it - I went and looked at another guy's page too, and I'm getting them confused). He had some other pictures of his skateboard and of his new tattoos. His comment at the top said that he wanted to spend more time with Caden and not always have to have Kayla around and he wished that maybe someday Caden could live with him. I really was on that page. SOMEBODY accepted my friend request, so somebody was logging into his account on MySpace just recently, and I was there for a couple days. He also had a video that I didn't get to see, and I forget what it was called, something he and a friend made together.

***
I hope I can fall asleep tonight. I feel like I'm going to have insomnia. I need to get up early in the morning.