LeeAnne: Betrayal Is a Bitch and Now She Has a Name!

Wow, what a week. Thanks for tuning in and watching the Big D drama unfold YET again.

A few things I want to address before we get started…

I never said that Brandi should address me as her elder. I said that Brandi should respect the fact that I’ve lived longer and have survived many more experiences, which gives me the wisdom (a.k.a. the “street smarts”), which I would LOVE to use to HELP HER, not hurt her.

Watching Cary talk about her husband always being right gives me so much more insight about why Cary tries so hard to be “right” with everyone in every conversation, especially with me. Cary, please note: I’m going to start letting you be right every once in a while.

This episode was very enlightening in a few ways.

I watched Stephanie and Travis’ relationship and in particular how Travis likes to control things. I’m reminded of Stephanie’s last blog about how she thinks I want to control things.

I watched Brandi and Bryan’s relationship and how she doesn’t feel like she gets the attention she needs from him. Then I hear Brandi say that I can’t remember her name and in many ways these things translate as me not giving her the attention she wants. So, I’m starting to understand why Cary, Brandi and Stephanie all have issues with me…

Brandi Redmond Finally Confronts her Husband

I think they subconsciously superimpose an image of their husband’s face on me and then come at me. I’m nothing like Mark, Travis, or Bryan. I’m LeeAnne. And I deserve to, at least, be seen as LeeAnne.

Watching this episode reminded me how much it hurts when you open your heart and life to someone for over ten years and they take it and flush it down the toilet. When you offer love, honor and dignity to someone and they don’t have the common decency to offer it back to you, one quickly figures out who their true friends are.

Have you ever asked a friend, “Did you say [insert comment here]?” and they said no? Then later, you see evidence that they did? I mean pure unadulterated evidence of it. That’s called taking advantage of someone’s trust. With me, you can’t just play with trust. That’s playing with my whole world. How else do we build relationships? If you don’t trust someone, you don’t have a relationship. And the trust I once had, even when I was still sitting there going over those texts, fighting and praying to be wrong, is now all gone. After all the years of trust and protection I offered her, not only from outside circumstances but from herself, she pulls something like this. Oh, the secrets I’ve kept in my vault!

The evidence in this episode doesn’t lie.

There’s one thing that Tiffany and I have in common: We do NOT deal with liars. I thought that Tiffany printing out the texts was the smartest thing she could’ve done. When Tiffany and I get into a confrontations, we sometimes get so worked up that we lose track of where we are. It’s almost like an adrenaline blindness. On the rare occasions that we find ourselves fighting, we have to stop and ask, “Wait, why are we fighting?” It’s so interesting how we are taken over by our instincts to a point where it blinds us from the subject at hand. This was a great idea in preparation for that conversation. That printed text said “We’re staying on track.”

If you watch Tiffany and I on that sofa, you see that we do not believe our former friend. That relationship, for us, is severed permanently. Going into the confrontation with her, I knew she was a liar. I knew the evidence in my hand said she was not my friend and not to be trusted. Watching it back now, I wish I’d felt even stronger about it, but I still had a window of hope. My favorite Bible verse is Acts 2:25: “I have pitched my tent in the land of hope,” and I live every relationship with hope that it will be what it’s supposed to be: pure and real, genuine, and kind. But knowing that it probably isn’t going to be.

I still went into that room hoping that she had a good excuse. I did NOT want to be right. I wanted her to say, “Listen, LeeAnne, I did this for this reason and this is what I’ve learned,” etc. I just wanted to know that I was wrong. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never gone into that confrontation. But the fact that I went shows that I still held out hope. I think Tiffany did, too, or else she wouldn’t have gone with me. In a way, I was still being a friend to someone who had stopped being a friend to me a long time ago.

Living a life that is overflowing with such negativity, to me, is the ultimate sorrow.

I believe that negative things need to be discussed and then put away. There will never be a resolution with her because SHE CANNOT TELL THE TRUTH! I think she is one of those people you can’t give a moment’s attention to because it just feeds that visceral hatred.

I’d like to mention that I now understand why Brandi hated me so much, with everything that my EX-friend filled her head with.

No wonder Brandi thought- “She thinks she is so important”; look at the texts.

No wonder Brandi thought- “She always has to be the center of attention”; look at the texts.

They all answer the question of why Brandi felt the way she felt. It all adds up from Day 1. When would Brandi have gained her own opinion of me naturally? She wouldn’t have. There was never a time when Brandi has been able to get to know me, on her own terms, without the Magic Ex-Friend Filter. She’s been told already a very different version of who I am.

The saddest part is that she now has her own tragedies in her own life. Ones that I wish I had been able to help her through, honestly! With everything going on in Brandi’s life, I truly hope that she will soon be able to clear her mind and listen to me with her heart. And I’m ready for that moment to happen.

Stay tuned and tweet with me @LeeAnneLocken.