Doug Buggle survived 12 years of narcissistic abuse. He spoke to Dispute Buddy founder Jenny Rudd about the marriage, the discard, finding other male survivors and getting his life back.
People assume domestic abuse only happens to women, and that a man built like he could pick up a fridge surely can't be one of the ones it happens to. That's just not true.
I know it's not true because I've built a company around proving it. Close to a third of the people who use Dispute Buddy to find a pattern of coercive control in their own text messages are men.
Doug Buggle is one of them. He's a big guy with a beard, a Jeep, and a 130-pound golden doodle called Lila who decided about four seconds into our call that I was a threat to the household. He does not look like anyone's idea of a victim, which is kind of the point.
He was married to a woman he calls Tammy in his book, Goodbye Tammy, Third Time Was Not a Charm, for 12 years. He met her while she was married to his best friend, and the affair that followed isn't something he tries to dress up.
But what matters here is what happened after.
Doug says Tammy put him on a pedestal early. Told him he was her Superman. Then, over the years, he was slowly taken apart, piece by piece, until he was left questioning almost everything about himself.
In July 2021, the marriage ended abruptly. Doug says Tammy cut contact, filed for divorce and accused him of domestic violence.
“It's like you're mourning the death of someone who's still alive,” he told me. “You can't go near that person. You can't talk to them. You can't text them, because they're saying you're an abuser. The more you try to get hold of them, the more it strengthens their story that you're the crazy one.”
It's brutal, and it's the same trap I hear from women who use Dispute Buddy, just with the genders flipped.
Doug says one of the most bewildering parts was trying to understand what had happened. He became obsessed with the why. Why had the woman who once put him on a pedestal suddenly discarded him? Why had everything changed? Why couldn't he just stop thinking about it?
A crisis counsellor was one of the first people to tell him to stop looking for the answer and start looking at what the experience had done to him.
She explained that after 12 years of conditioning, his brain had become accustomed to a certain way of thinking, and that changing those patterns would take time. She encouraged him to put Post-it notes around the house with reminders of the things he knew to be true, words like, I am strong, I am a good person, I am loved, my kids are amazing.
It was simple, and Doug needed simple. He also needed to know he wasn't the only man this had happened to.
He found a private Facebook group for male survivors and started reading. He asked questions and, almost immediately, people responded with their own experiences. It was the first time he felt like he wasn't alone.
Then he found a podcast called Dimming the Gaslight and, in 2022, told his story publicly for the first time.
He was still, in his words, “in the thick of the weeds”. He was in the middle of the divorce, still trying to understand what had happened and nowhere near finished healing. He says he talked quickly and told pretty much the whole story.
A year later, he went back on the podcast and he was a different man. The book was coming together, and he could talk about what had happened without being so consumed by it.
Then came The Narcissist's Playbook.
Doug was contacted after a friend told him the filmmakers were looking for male survivors. He initially sent a message on Instagram, then waited while emails disappeared into his spam folder. Eventually he connected with the team and was interviewed by filmmakers including Mark Vicente.
They told him they wanted someone who challenged the picture people have in their heads of what a male survivor looks like.
Doug is a huge, bearded guy with a big personality. He isn't what most people imagine when they picture someone who has been controlled or emotionally abused.
During filming, he thought he was healed, then they asked him if he was still trauma bonded to Tammy. He said no. But his best friend, who was standing behind the crew, gave him a look. So they asked him again.
This time, Doug admitted the answer was yes.
He went home after filming and slept for hours. He describes the experience as running a mental marathon.
It was a reminder that healing isn't necessarily a straight line. You can think you've put something behind you and then find yourself right back in the middle of it when someone asks the right question.
And Doug thinks that's one of the reasons men need more places to talk about this stuff.
Men are expected to be strong, to provide and to suck it up. Admitting that someone has been controlling or manipulating you doesn't exactly fit the traditional picture of masculinity.
Doug says abuse doesn't have a gender, but the shame around admitting it can feel very gendered.
For him, finding other men who understood was a turning point.
He has since had men from around the world contact him after hearing his story. One man in the US eventually told Doug about his own experience. The two later met in person, and the man told Doug that his story had helped him save his family, and possibly his life.
Helping someone else recognise what is happening, before they lose years of their life trying to understand it, is something Doug doesn't take lightly.
His book, written under the pen name Teddy Bowers, was part of that.
Doug says he wrote Goodbye Tammy: Third Time Was Not a Charm with the goal being that if he helped one person, male or female, then he would have accomplished what he set out to do.
But something happened that he never expected. While writing the book, Doug tracked down the man his former wife had been married to before him. He had only a first and last name, but eventually found him and sent emails to several addresses.
The man replied within an hour, and they spoke on the phone for four hours.
Doug deliberately didn't tell him his own story first. He wanted to hear the man's experience without influencing it. What he heard was a very different account of the marriage from the one he had been told.
Years later, that same man bought Doug's book. He read the chapter Doug had written about him and contacted him. He told Doug he'd captured the story beautifully, and he also told him something else.
He hadn't thought about his former marriage for about 30 years. His children didn't know about it, but every now and then he'd wondered whether there was something he could have done differently.
Reading Doug's book gave him closure he didn't know he needed.
Doug tears up telling me this part. He feels things fully, and that kind of honesty is contagious. By the time he's finished, I'm a bit emotional too.
These days, Doug still talks about red flags. He says if someone tells you they love you within days, or announces that you're soulmates because it feels like you've known each other your whole lives, don't automatically take it as a compliment. Pay attention to what happens next.
If you're put on a pedestal one day and dropped into the basement the next because you loaded the dishwasher wrong, that's worth noticing too.
His advice is to educate yourself, listen to other people's experiences and look at the pattern rather than one isolated incident.
That's the whole premise Dispute Buddy is built on too.
No single message ever looks like abuse on its own. It's the pattern across hundreds of them, over years, that can tell a very different story. And it's almost impossible to see that pattern clearly when you're standing in the middle of it.
Three years after filming The Narcissist's Playbook, Doug is living about a mile from his old house. He's in a healthy relationship with a girlfriend he calls the real thing. He's written a book, appeared in a documentary and co-written a movie script based on his story.
The script is a dramedy. Because, eventually, Doug says, you can laugh at some of it.
He hasn't sworn off relationships or decided everyone is out to get him. If anything, he says he has a better radar now. He spots unhealthy behaviour more quickly and knows when to step back.
But he's not interested in becoming bitter. He's finally got his life back.
For a man who once couldn't understand how he'd gone from being someone's Superman to being accused of being the villain, that's probably the best ending he could have written.
Doug Buggle's book, Goodbye Tammy: Third Time Was Not a Charm, is written under the pen name Teddy Bowers and is available now.
He appears in the documentary The Narcissist's Playbook, directed by Mark Vicente.
You can also follow Doug on Instagram.
