JD McCabe: The Light at the End of a Narcissistic Tunnel

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

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After nearly two decades of marriage today’s guest was thrown into a tailspin. His ex wife accused him of cheating and drug use, and even went as far as to get him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric. Here to talk about the positive that he took away from it all and what you can learn about yourself in hard times.

Please welcome JD McCabe. We’re ready to grow your business. And I love helping entrepreneurs find success. So let’s do this. I’m Damon Burton, Forbes contributor, author of the search engine optimization book, outrank and president of SEO. I’ve been featured on Forbes, entrepreneur and hundreds of websites and podcasts for helping big businesses grow bigger and make more money by showing up higher on search engines, including shark tank, featured businesses, NBA teams, and Inc 5,000 companies.

I’m bringing my successful network to you here@learningfromothers.com. Whether success to you means financial freedom, freedom of time or freedom of the soul, we’re in this together. Welcome to the learning from others podcast.

Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my SEL book outrank. If you visit www.freeseobook.com today, well, JD in the cave. Thanks for jumping on learning from others. I appreciate you. Um, you know, you and I, we are new friends.

This, all of your stories are going to jump into our listeners are going to be stories from me as well. So I appreciate you joining us. Uh, no, thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. Thank you. So, um, I want to, you know, you’ve listened to a couple episodes and like I said, we’re pretty informal.

Um, and I, but what I’d like to ask, and then we’re going to dig in deeper is let’s just start with the normal three questions. Question number one is, you know, what’s your background? What are we going to chat about with you today? Yeah, so my background is, uh, been in the pharmaceutical industry. 30 little over 30 years.

Um, my current role, I oversee the contracts for our organization in the hospital space. Uh, so with the COVID deal, things have been, uh, quite interesting in 2020, uh, but in March of 2020 hours. So, um, launched my book I published had, was fortunate enough to have my memoir, uh, published by, by mascot books.

And so I’ve been. You know, by day doing the pharmaceutical stuff by night and weekend, do what I can to kind of share my story with others. All right. And I want to ask you about your memoir, but not until I ask you, JD, what do you suck? What do I suck at? Other than marriage? I would say this. I would say I not real good, not very handy, not good with a hammer with a saw.

I can’t, I can’t really build anything. I can tear things apart, but I can’t, I’m not very good at building anything. The list of what I suck at is actually pretty long. The other piece is I’m new to the whole social media game. So I’m not really. Putting videos together for, you know, Instagram reveals or for Tik TOK.

So I’ve got a social media individual that helps me with that. So I’m not very technically inclined either. Well, Hey, you’re, you’re ahead of many by, by acknowledging your weakness and bringing somebody on board to help you out. So you’ve got a, you got this book and you say you were fortunate to have your memoir published.

So. What what’s the background? Why what’s the, what’s the elevator pitch on a memoir? Um, are you famous? Is this what your memoir is? No, no. The, the mem the memoir is about an unimaginable divorce after being happily married for 17 years. And so folks that have read the book have those that know me know the story is true, but folks that have read them.

Claim that it’s it’s camp. Can’t be non-fiction. This stuff can not possibly be true, but I had a very happy marriage and then things can came off real quickly. Uh, the last six years of our marriage, and I guess the elevator pitch on it is I wrote the book and I was encouraged to write. Because of all the twists and turns in the unbelievable story, but also because of the fact that there’s very few books out there about men on the other side of the equation, men being in abusive relationships and, you know, nine months on the census has been released.

I’ve heard from not only men, but. Quite a few females about the abusive relationships that they’re in. And the reason for writing it was to hopefully not only share, share an entertaining story, but also to, uh, encourage them each others and to help them feel a sense of inspiration that they’re not alone because as I went through my crazy ride, that’s one of the things that kept me grounded.

Damon was too, just in talking to people, hearing their stories, you realize, you know, I don’t have it so bad. I don’t have it so bad at all. So. You know, listen to one of your other guests about, uh, intentional encouragement, um, uh, Brian Sexton. So perhaps hopefully it’ll offer some folks a little bit of hope, a little bit of encouragement that you can get through things.

So you can get through the worst adversity. If you focus on kind of your blessings and what you have. So, yeah, that’s, um, you know, there’s a lot to unwrap there, but I think with, with the book, it’s, it’s fair enough that we, we dig into it deeper and give you an opportunity to talk about your book. But, uh, but like you said, share some of these experiences with others.

So you said six years, that’s about how long it took for this all to kind of unravel started in 20, 20 10 with just subtle accusations from my now ex-wife around infidelity, which ultimately. Related into drug addiction. Uh, so I was accused of doing drugs. I was accused of, uh, infidelity, um, and just all sorts of.

Delusional and paranoia that began to really ramp up in 2014. So from 2010 to 2014, we were still relatively happy, but she would occasionally accused me of, uh, you know, stepping outside of the marriage would ask to see my emails. I’d asked to see my phone. And of course I obliged I was somewhat defensive about it.

And in hindsight, I probably should. I should. I know I should’ve been, I should’ve been looking at her phone and her emails, but, uh, so yeah, there were, there were accusations. Yeah. Really the summer of 2014 is when things really heated up and, and her mother who got involved and got involved with our marriage and on a family beach trip, she threatened her mother threatened to kill me and suggest that I was addicted to porn and suggested I was addicted to drugs.

And I, you know, I’m not sure what her daughter was telling her, but, um, because we never had an open and honest conversation as to why this was occurring. So summer of 2014 into the spring of 2014 is when things really fell apart. And, uh, I ended up being in voluntarily. Spent nine days in a psychiatric facility.

I was gaslighted. I was emotionally, yeah. I was emotionally abused by, you know, my wife and my mother-in-law and, uh, sadly I had my daughter alienated from me for almost two years because she, she used her as a weapon. Convinced her, that her father had a drug problem had a mood issue. Yeah. So it was, it was quite the journey and the, in the summer of 2014.

So have you figured out what triggered all this, you know, looking back, is there, is there an underlying issue that brought this all on? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, and this, this is the reason for the title of the book is, is the, the third one. The first two gifts for my kids, but the third gift was clarity that after she had made a revelation to me through our attorneys, so we, we moved, we ended up separating in 2015.

We ended up in the legal system, the family court system in 2016. But yeah, her revelation that she made through an attorney, um, that I had given her an STD is what opened my eyes to look at five years of medical claims, five years of pharmacy claims. And I discovered that in fact, everything she had been accusing me of.

She was actually doing. So I discovered I’ve discovered the fact that she had pretty much every STD out there and also she had a drug problem. So she was using our kids for two years, uh, in 2011 and 2012 to fill amphetamines and their names to the tune of 600 days worth. So I’ve built spreadsheets. All of this out.

And fortunately Damon I’m, as I mentioned at the outset, I’m in the pharmaceutical business. And so I know how to decipher billing codes and things like that. And I spent hours and hours and hours looking back through stacks of medical claims and pharmacy claims that I did not, no, I had even had access to, um, I had no idea it was all at my fingertips the whole time I could’ve looked could have looked at any time.

So yeah, that was what helped me to uncover that. Okay. She clearly has a signature. Under Lee had a significant underlying mental illness that she just could no longer contain the demons. And then when she started abusing psychiatric medications, it only made things worse. I had only exacerbated the situation.

So do you think this was her mechanism in her eyes to be proactively defensive? To, to. She felt she knew she knew it was gonna catch up at some point. And so she was pointing blame ahead of time. Well, I think the other piece of it, again, it’s a speculation on my part, but I think the other, the other piece of it was for whatever reason she, she wanted out of the marriage, but didn’t.

Egg on her face, so to speak, um, clearly had to come up for a reason to come up with a reason as to why the marriage fell apart and decided she was going to project all of, all of her shortcomings onto me. And that’s, that’s what, that’s what made me really unravel emotionally in the summer of 2014. And you know, one of the things that I’ve, I’ve said to many people is as you’re going through something difficult, please don’t keep it to yourself.

That was the biggest mistake that I made in 2014. I kept it all to myself, um, and shared it with nobody. And I come from a lot of very large family. I come from a family of nine I’m, the middle child of nine. And so that, that would, that would be something I would say, find a confidant, share, find somebody that you can trust to have some outside eyes assess the situation for you.

What do you think would have been different if anything, or we’ll do it just made you have more confidence in going through that? Like what would have been different if you reached out. I think if I would have reached out to somebody, I may have left the marriage. And, and, and the other piece is I may have started to looking, I may have started to look into things in her emails and in her phone, I certainly would have probably taken a look at pharmacy claims and medical claims sooner.

Cause she just hid so much from me. So I think somebody, if somebody would have said to me, yeah, Maybe she’s the one, maybe she’s projecting all of this on you. I certainly would’ve looked into things sooner. Is there, was there something that happened before this, that had a boiling point that caused this to all unravel or, or did she just have personal issues that just evolved?

But in the salon, I really believe, and I talk about it. I talk about it in the book. I really believe that a decision she had to make in, in December of 2007, she had to make the tragic decision to take her father off of life support in 2007. So her parents had had divorced. Just when she was two years old, it turns out her father was, was gay and, you know, left the marriage.

And she was estranged from her father for 10 years. She reconnected, we reconnected with him the last five years of his life. And he suddenly had a massive heart attack December of 2007. And I think that was the tipping point for her, that losing him and then losing. Lifelong partner three years later, I think just sent her into a downward spiral spiral because when I looked back.

Her initiation of drugs. Uh, it was in, it was in 2010 now I didn’t have access to pharmacy claims before that, because I had changed employers, but I believe it was in 2010 that perhaps guilt the emptiness that she felt, um, in losing 10 years of her father’s life. I think it just sent her in a really sent her into it.

That’s been my, my theory now, others, um, because we have lots of therapy involved. We had lots of attorneys involved. Uh, others have suggested that I was, I was married to somebody with borderline personality disorder. And so I got educated pretty quickly. Um, once we separated, I got educated. You know, dealing with a narcissistic personality, borderline personality disorder.

I was instructed to get educated in it as we moved through separation and ultimately divorced to understand who I would be dealing with. And, um, it, it was very insightful. I mean, everything that I’ve read, I’m like, oh, this was the law. This was the life that I led for the last six years with a gaslighting, with the projection.

And so it’s yeah, I was sadly married to somebody with borderline personality disorder. What was it like when you were in voluntarily committed? Did you start to question if maybe you were there justifiably? Actually, it was probably the best thing that, well, it was one of the best things that had happened to me.

Although I, at the time when you’re, when you’re in there, Uh, which was, you know, it was very scary. Um, but when, when you’re in there, you do see folks with actual, real mental health issues. And I sympathize a lot of them today. Cause I was in there with a lot of young kids that indeed were suicidal that indeed taken their life that got no help through.

There was no counseling. There was just over-medication of everybody for, you know, for your, for your stay. But I did see, I did see bipolar, so I had been misdiagnosed. Polar too. And I was involuntarily committed by our family practitioner, just kind of nonchalantly and I died and, you know, I lay on, I lay it all out and describe everything that happened in detail in the book.

But once I got out of there, I thought, okay, I don’t, I didn’t, I never accepted the fact that I had bipolar. And once I got out. Yeah, stayed in the marriage for another six, seven months, whether it was right, whether it’s wrong. I’m glad that I did because that’s when the third gift was, was revealed, you know, six or seven months later had I not stayed in the marriage, I may have never looked at any of the stuff that I looked at, inner pharmacy claims and medical claims, but it opened my eyes to the fact that, okay.

Yeah. Maybe, maybe there’s some things you have to work on, but you do not have a mood disorder. You do not have bipolar, but for the sake of it, Marriage and trying to repair the marriage marriage. I continued to see a psychiatrist for a short period of time after that. And ultimately, you know, he stopped short of apologizing.

Um, basically stayed in the eye, you know, I, I misdiagnosed you. And so it was, it was helpful to be in there, but I, I thought I was at rock bottom, you know, when I was in there and when I was ready to get out, I was looking forward to rebuilding our family unit, um, reestablishing a relationship with my daughter.

That that would not happen because things would only get worse at home for the next seven, eight months prior a post on my time in a psychiatric hospital. So are things, um, what are the things like with your dad? They’re excellent. Yeah, so I have both of my kids in my life. Unfortunately, they don’t really have a relationship with their mother, you know, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll periodically text with her, but they don’t, they don’t, they don’t talk to her.

They haven’t seen her since last December. So, and she, she left, we had been residing in North Carolina now live in South Carolina, but she left North Carolina in may of 2017 and moved to Florida. Never attended our daughter’s high school graduation. And my daughter is getting set to graduate from college here in may.

And she will not be present there either. So it’s quite quite sad. Um, but yeah, my relationship with my kids is outstanding and I’m blessed to have my daughter back in my life and fortunate enough that she was old enough, you know, 15, 16 to be able to recognize once she lived with mom on her own, to be able to recognize.

When something’s not right here, um, with mom. And so it was, it was the effects of the, the, the medications that were kicking in and her paranoia and her delusions. I mean, it was, it was in the stratosphere. Are, are things as far as you’re aware, still the same on her end or has she acknowledged anything?

No, she has not. She’s actually gone the other direction. And this is one of the biggest issues for our kids is, you know, it’s, it’s over and done with, they just want, they just want the denial to stop from ’em. I mean, all of the evidence is, well, my kids have right. The book you wanted to read the book and they knew they knew what was going on in, in, in, in the marriage.

It fell apart because I had to tell them the truth. You know, they were old enough that they were asking questions. Yeah. And, and quite frankly, you know, the, the third gift is when she accused me of giving her an STD, she went to the kids and when my daughter wasn’t in my life, she went to the kids prior to my negative test results.

Coming back, we were separated at the time. She went to the kids and told them that I had given her this STD and that she’s got proof that, you know, dad stepped outside of the marriage. Well, two or three negative tests later, you know, the kids are like, okay. Yeah, that, that was not the case. Well, was it hard for you to know that the kids were reading the book?

No, they, they, so I just, the book was, like I said, the book was released last, last March. So now my daughter is now 22. My son had just turned 26 on the 17th of January here. So yeah, they were, I figured that they were old enough and they needed, they needed to know that. So they, they said, and I started writing it in 2017 and they, I asked their permission if you will.

And said, I said, I hope you’re all right with it. I’m going to write this book. Um, the book is not about bashing their, their mom. It’s about laying out the facts of what happened. It’s also about faith. It’s about family. It’s about friends. It’s about a lot of good people that stepped up to not only support me emotionally, but also support my kids.

And a lot of people that have stepped in to provide at least a mother role for, for my daughter, because as she was going through her later teen years in high school and into college, that was a role that I couldn’t fill for her. So there were a couple of wonderful women that have stepped up to provide that motherly guidance that I fell short on.

So you asked things, I sucked. I suck it a second. Being a mother I’m not good at it. Yeah. You know, I was going to kind of, kind of bring up that topic. That’s cool that you had some people that step up, have you had anybody that’s kind of come around and did apologize or did say, Hey, I saw things from the wrong perspective?

Uh, no, nobody, nobody on her side. Uh, sadly, um, her mother passed away, I would say rather suddenly a couple of years ago they were living together in Florida. She came from a small family. So it was just her mom and her brother. And I’ve never heard from her. I never heard from her brother throughout this whole journey.

And I would have thought that I would have heard from him because one of her other accusations that she started spinning with her mom and with others is that I had anger issues and she feared that I was going to kill her. Uh, and I, I never laid a hand on her. So I would have thought that while we were still together in the marriage, trying to work things out, I really expected a phone call from her brother to say, you know, we need to talk about that.

Yeah mean, he never, he never confronted, never confronted me. And I haven’t talked to him in four years, five years now, and there’s really no contact with my, my kids from that, from the her side, her family side either. So yeah, what’s the, what’s the most unexpected thing that you’ve taken out of this journey, I suppose.

Good or bad unexpected that? Well, I think the, well, the good, there’s a lot of good that I’ve taken out of it and I, and, and my, my faith has become strong. But I’ve also really have a new, profound sense of gratitude, you know, to, to, to make sure that you count your blessings every day. Um, you’re grateful for what you have and you recognize, you know, you don’t get hung up on what you don’t have, but you’re thankful for what you have.

And I know it’s cliche, but throughout the journey, a lot of cliches came true because I, I. I had to some days really physically sit down and process all that was going on from, you know, um, domestic violence charges being filed against me to just my character, my integrity being assassinated and folks painting, painting a picture of me that was not based in fact, and was not true.

So gratitude, gratitude, and faith would be the two biggest things that, uh, good to come out of it. And then the other piece. That I was a, I’ve reconnected with a lot of friends that I had not talked to in 20 plus years. So, you know, the whole concept of not burning bridges held true in my case. Cause I needed to cross back over, back over many bridges.

Fortunately I had established trust and credibility with. These people that I was, I was able to easily navigate, make that, make that happen. Um, so connecting with strengthening, family relationships, strengthening relationships, making new friendships and reconnecting with old friends, some of the I’m going to say there’s more light than there was darkness throughout the journey.

And I hope, I, I hope I make that clear in the book. I hope I’ve made that clear. Yeah. That’s what I was going to kind of wrap up with was asking you, what do you hope readers take away from the book? The biggest thing would be one of the biggest things would be that they’re not alone. And as I’ve been out promoting the book, you know, I’ve been on several different podcasts and just connecting with people.

You hear, hear your, hear other people’s stories and you, again, you recognize it. You don’t have it so bad, but I hope that they take away the fact that, yeah, don’t, don’t go it alone. If you’re dealing with. Please do not keep it to yourself, especially if you’re especially for the males out there that like to maybe swallow their pride and not want to open up or be emotional with somebody.

You know, I think, I think that should be hopefully a message of encouragement, maybe a message of inspiration to, to recognize that, you know, we’re, we’re all going through this together in life and we all have a story to tell. And I think there’s real power. When you sit down and share a story with somebody and they share yours, I think there’s a, a feeling of relativity, um, that, that happens.

Yeah, well, Hey, I appreciate you coming on JD and being transparent insurance, some of this. So I want to give you the last few moments to tell the listeners where they can find out more about the book. Yeah, well, again, Damon, I really can’t. Thank you enough. And I want to thank Nate Bailey, um, for helping to make the connection with you.

But, uh, I’m on Instagram at, at, at the third gift and on Facebook at the third gift, the book is available in ebook platform. It’s available through mascot books, but also Amazon Barnes and noble and all of your major, uh, major online retailers. Very cool. JD McCabe, thirdgift.com. Thanks for joining. All right.

Thank you, Damon, Damon Burton here, and thank you so much for listening to the learning from others podcast. I sincerely hope that today’s guest helped you learn something since 2007, I’ve generated millions of dollars for businesses like yours. Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my new SEO book out.

If you visit www.freeseobook.com today.