u/Far_Home9497

Hi everyone,

I’m from the UK and recently received an invitation to apply for the IEC Working Holiday category on 15th of June just 4 days after entering the pool.

The problem is that when I completed my original profile, I am 100% certain that I selected “No” when asked if I had a job offer and when I go back to look at my original application to the pool it definitely says no so I didn’t answer yes in error. However, now that I’m filling out my actual application, the form has the answer greyed out as “Yes”, and I can’t change it.

Because of this, I can’t submit my application correctly.

My invitation clearly says Working Holiday, so I’m really confused about why it’s showing that I have a job offer when I don’t.

I’ve already submitted web forms to IRCC but have only received generic replies, and my invitation expires in about 7 days, so I’m starting to panic. I really don’t want to have to decline and then try again as I know that I was very lucky to get an invitation so quickly.

Has this happened to anyone else before? If so:

Were you able to get it corrected and how?
Does anybody have any phone numbers that work to speak to an actual human?
Did IRCC fix it for you?
Did you have to decline your invitation and re-enter the pool?
If you did decline, were you invited again?

Any advice or experiences would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!

I have been extremely attached to and deeply in love with my toxic and abusive ex for 5 and a half years. I ended the relationship last month finally and have been extremely sad, depressed and just lost. I’ve been feeling like I’ve genuinely been dying, I can’t even describe this feeling of heartbreak. My sister is very spiritual and believes that he was karmic. Tonight my sister and I decided to light a fire in our garden and burn all of the letters, pictures, gifts, paperwork etc between us over the years in hopes of a cleanse. This was an extremely big step for me because I am very sentimental and I kept everything in a binder for years to show our children in the future, that was always the reason why.

As soon as we started burning things and setting intentions, it started to rain which it was not forecasted to. It rained on and off throughout the evening and each time I set intentions out loud and was asking the universe to remove all attachment and connection to him, the rain started pouring. We saw lots of purple and blue flames on the fire throughout the evening and one of the last things we burnt was a binder that had a picture of us taped to the inside of it. As soon as we put it on the fire the flames started to rise up the left side straight up to his face and his whole face turned black while the flames did not touch my face at all, it remained completely untouched, the flames then engulfed his face and his face fell into the ashes into a sort of pit while again I remained untouched. The flames then started to dance slowly around me and burnt around me from the underneath, with the flames still rising up underneath me. The flames then turned green as the last of that burnt out.

We thought we were done but we then found the paper mache heart in the bottom of the bag with my name on that he’d made me that symbolised me always being in his heart. We burnt that also and it very quickly turned black, no big flames just burnt and then ash. The rain had stopped for about an hour at the point and then started to rain again at the end. As soon as we put it in the fire my sister said she got really bad vibes and energy from it and I got goosebumps even though it was warm.

I also started to experience a really blocked nose throughout the process and snot was dripping out and I haven’t had a cold and don’t suffer with sinus issues.

I would love and appreciate some insight please! 🙏🏽

I’ve been in a long distance relationship, I’m in the UK 27F he’s in the USA 30M, for just over 5 years and during those first 5 years he never exhibited any signs of narcissism or controlling behaviours. We had usual couple disagreements here and there but they were always handled very well. His job involved working away a lot so we only saw each other once a year, he switched jobs in February and is now based at home so since February I have been flying out every month to spend 2 weeks at a time with him. Since February he has started to exhibit a lot of controlling behaviours, constantly accusing me of cheating on him, constant paranoia about me lying and cheating.

I need to constantly be updating him with videos and pictures of where I am and what I’m doing even though he has my location, he FaceTimes me 100 times a day and if I don’t answer within the first few rings I’ll be questioned so I’ve now started taking my phone into the shower etc and have constant anxiety around missing a call or a text, he asked for my social media passwords which I gave him but he still said that he was struggling with trusting me so he then asked for the password to the security cameras in my flat. I have been saying yes to all of his demands because I’m genuinely not doing anything, all I do is go to work and then sit on the phone to him, I’ve never once cheated or lied in my life to him so I’ve been saying yes to everything that he’s been requesting hoping that it will help ease his suspicions but no amount of access is helping him. He has said that the next trip that I come on he is arranging a polygraph because that is the only way that he will ever trust me. Even when we fell asleep on FaceTime a couple of days ago he told me that he stayed up the entire time watching me and in 7 hours I didn’t move once and he also heard moaning sounds so he’s now convinced that I was cheating on him during that phone call and I had set up a green screen. I’ve tried so hard to be patient and understanding and accommodating, trying to figure out where these accusations have come from because we’ve never had any problems like this and he has said that it is because I have started acting different which I don’t understand how or why he feels like that because I have not changed anything. I’m trying to reason with him and I’m trying to get him to believe me, in the beginning he was saying that he was really sorry and things like please don’t give up on him and he knows that his behaviour is not okay he’s just really struggling with anxiety all of a sudden but then over the past maybe 6 weeks things have got really bad and any time he does have these outbursts of accusations and paranoia there is no apology anymore, it’s all my fault for acting different or not doing enough to reassure him.

He’s also started to speak to me in a really horrible way when he does have these moments where he’s accusing me and has even started requesting very degrading things like he tried to initiate phone sex last week and when I said sorry babe I’m not in the mood because my period has just started, he made me pull my underwear down on FaceTime to show him my bloody period pad to prove that my period had started and when I asked why he was getting me to do that he said that he initially thought I was lying about getting my period so that I didn’t have to have phone sex with him because he’s convinced that I’m cheating on him and having sex elsewhere.

I feel like me enabling his behaviour and constantly giving him more and more access and constantly explaining and being willing to sit there on FaceTime for hours and hours and hours crying begging pleading him to believe me, I feel like that’s enabled his behaviour and now he doesn’t see it as a problem, now he sees it as I’m not doing enough for him. I do think it is time to leave him but I guess what I’m struggling with is where this is coming from. I know that it doesn’t matter and I don’t need to put a label on it for it to be unhealthy or unsafe but I guess I’ve always just been the type of person that really struggles to accept something if I don’t understand it and I have truly been so invested in him and love him more than anything in the world and have been willing to move my whole life around the world for him so I’m really just trying to understand where this could be coming from, I think I’m understanding it will help me leave him.

All of the research that I’m doing about his behaviour is pointing towards him being a narcissist, basically every single thing I’m reading about narcissistic relationships and how they are controlling and they don’t take any accountability and they’re unable to see an issue with their behaviour and they have such an inflated sense of self, even all of the little skit videos I can see about narcissistic abuse and narcissistic relationships, I literally feel like I’m watching a typical day in the life of my relationship when I’m watching those role-plays but I just don’t know if it really is narcissism because he has not exhibited any of these traits for 5 years. Surely if he was a narcissist he would’ve been unable to hide that for all of these years?

And I know a lot of people will be reading this thinking he’s probably cheating so he’s projecting but I honestly don’t think he is. Obviously I could be wrong but he lives with his older brother who adores me who is in constant contact with me apologising for his behaviour and trying to be there for me because he knows that how he’s acting has not been okay and I really do think that if he was having women over at the house he would let me know. I also don’t know how he would possibly have the time to cheat because he literally lives on FaceTime to me.

Was released from prison in February 2026, was sentenced to 6 - 15 years. Was released from prison on their earliest release date after the 6 years and now on a 2 year parole. Been out for 3.5 months. Somebody has contacted the parole agent to let them know that for the past 3.5 months the parolee has been in bars, drinking, using drugs and has not been home by 11pm most nights which are all terms of their parole. The person who has reported them can provide lots of evidence including dates, times, pictures, videos and text messages to prove all of this. What is likely to happen? Would they go to jail for a short time and then be released with stricter conditions such as a tether? Could this person go back to prison?

I’m a 27-year-old woman in England and I’ve been involved on and off with a 30-year-old man in the US for about 5½ years after meeting through a prison penpal site. He was incarcerated for theft of iPhones. He was released from prison in February this year.

I visited him in the US for 10 days after his release and things were amazing. I went back again in April for 2 weeks, but leading up to that trip things had already become extremely unhealthy. He became intensely paranoid that I was cheating or hiding things despite never once catching me cheating, lying, or doing anything suspicious.

For the first 2 weeks after coming home after the first trip, things were great. Then the paranoia started. It started with small things being interpreted as “off” behaviour — for example after I came home from the first trip, I didn’t want phone sex for a few days because my period was due, and he later said that’s when his trust issues started because I “started acting different.” Other normal behaviour then became suspicious to him like taking more than a few rings to answer a FaceTime call because my phone was in the other room or not replying immediately because I was cleaning. Any time that these things happens, I was accused of being with somebody else.

Over the next couple of weeks until the next trip, I started constantly reassuring him and changing my behaviour to avoid accusations:

always being available,
updating him constantly,
sitting on FaceTime for hours every night,
screen sharing while on FaceTime
sharing my location
constantly explaining myself
Having to show him around my flat on FaceTime, open cupboard doors to show him that nobody was hiding in them

A few days before my April trip we fell asleep on FaceTime together and the next morning he told me that throughout the night he was hearing moaning and lots of banging and lots of noises and he was convinced that I was fake sleeping on a green screen. He then started asking for things like my iCloud login and Instagram password to “prove” I wasn’t doing anything. I refused because by that point I already felt like nothing was ever enough and more access would just create more paranoia. I was genuinely becoming ill with the constant accusations and treading on eggshells and there would be 2/3 hour long conversations every evening when I got home from work with me trying to reassure him and him accusing me of the next thing I was supposedly lying about.

The only thing that had kept me in a relationship with him until this point was the fact that he was very self-aware, when he wasn’t spiralling he would say to me I know that this isn’t healthy and I know that I’ve got severe trust issues and I know that what I’m asking of you isn’t right or healthy and you are justified in saying no to passwords etc but he said that if I really wasn’t doing anything behind his back and I really wanted to try and help him then I would have no problem sharing these things so I’m essentially making everything worse by not helping him, completely disregarding how I have changed my entire lifestyle to help ease his fears.

I was debating on whether to go on the April trip or not but decided to go hoping that me physically being there with him would be able to help ease his anxieties and help him feel more secure for when I next go home.

During my April trip I discovered he had secretly bought spy cameras off Amazon and hidden them in the bedroom and bathroom to record me and monitor my phone screen while he was in another room. I saw loads of recordings of me just lying on the bed on TikTok while he watched remotely. I barely reacted at the time because I had become so used to trying to soothe his trust issues.

Aside from finding out about the spy cameras, the April trip went extremely well and I felt really positive coming home (that sounds crazy I know given the history of everything) but within a couple of days things went back to how they were before. He then requested that I gave him access to the security camera in my flat which I stupidly agreed to hoping that would solve all of our problems because I knew that I had genuinely nothing to hide. When the cameras obviously proved nobody was coming in or out, instead of feeling reassured he just moved the accusations onto my “behaviour” instead — things like turning lights on/off, the way I moved around, etc. He would call me a “weirdo” constantly for completely normal things like questioning why I kept my hairbrush in the living room rather than my bedroom and he was telling me that I was manipulating lights in a certain way to block certain doorways to sneak people in.

He has also screen recorded FaceTimes and later interrogates me about tiny movements like:

“At 4:27 why did you look left, who was there?”

I genuinely started feeling psychologically unwell:

hypervigilant,
constantly on eggshells,
scared to miss calls,
scared to move wrong on FaceTime,
constantly trying to prevent accusations.

A couple of weeks ago I basically had a mental breakdown and told him I can’t do it anymore and this is where I revoked camera access, turned my location off and told him I wasn’t going to continue in this relationship anymore if he doesn’t change and work on himself. Since then, over the past couple of weeks things have been better (less accusations) but there are massive double standards which I believe he has only done to punish me for revoking the access:

he has changed his phone password and told me that I can’t go on his phone anymore when we’re physically together
he stopped sharing his location,
he admits he withholds affection (says luv u when I say I love you things like that) and refuses to explain things to “make me feel how he feels,” (for example on a FaceTime I saw him zooming in on a picture of a girl on his camera roll in the reflection of his glasses and when I asked him about that he told me that he would not explain anything because I refuse to give him my passwords)
he’s gone out to bars until 5am leaving his phone at home
but if I question anything, I’m accused of “spinning things.”

Meanwhile, emotionally the relationship has become completely one-sided. Everything revolves around regulating him and his anxiety. Even though I’m not being met with extreme accusations anymore, constant little comments are being made. My needs only seem to matter when they don’t conflict with his insecurities.

Examples:

I recently found a lump in my breast and had an appointment at a breast clinic. Despite all our issues, he didn’t even check in or ask how it went. I genuinely think he forgot because he’s so consumed with himself and monitoring me.
Sex is extremely selfish. He doesn’t care about my pleasure and refuses oral sex, while everything revolves around him.

Financially I’ve invested massively:

flights,
hotels,
clothes,
trips,
general support,
probably around £10k over the years.

He recently promised to start paying me back weekly after getting a job, but so far has only sent £250 and complains about sending money despite having very low living expenses.

The biggest issue now is that I genuinely feel like there is no “solving” this because the goalposts constantly move. Whenever I provide proof or reassurance, a new accusation appears:

cameras proved nobody entered my flat → accusations shifted to my behaviour,
he demanded to see my emails to prove I logged him out of Spotify because he suddenly couldn’t access my Spotify on his phone → when no password reset email existed, he claimed I must have deleted it,
every reassurance just turns into another theory.

He says I’m manipulative and “spin things,” but I have been doing nothing but bending over backwards trying to help him while becoming mentally drained in the process.

The confusing part is that I do believe he genuinely loves me and is just really struggling with adjusting to life in the real world and I don’t think he can help the way he feels insecure and paranoid because he was never like this in prison. He is very self-aware like I have said and he is very aware of the fact that his behaviour isn’t normal and it’s unfair to me. I don’t think he wakes up every day thinking “I want to abuse her.” But at the same time, his behaviour has become controlling, emotionally exhausting, invasive, and honestly psychologically damaging for me.

He is now saying he wants me to do a polygraph/lie detector test in June when i’m next due to fly out to see him, he says that’s the only way that this behaviour is going to stop, he needs proof from a lie detector test that I am not a cheat or a liar. At first I agreed because I genuinely have nothing to hide and I thought maybe it would finally put everything to bed, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realised that even if I passed, I honestly don’t think it would change anything. Every time one accusation gets disproved, another one appears instead. It feels like he’s so determined to prove I’m lying that no amount of reassurance, evidence or “proof” will ever actually be enough.

Right now I’m at the point where:

I love him,
but I don’t think I can do this anymore,
I feel like I’ve lost myself,
and I’m struggling to tell whether there’s genuinely any hope of recovery after enabling/reinforcing this dynamic for so long.

Has anyone actually come back from a relationship dynamic this extreme and ended up healthy? Or is this realistically too far gone?

I’m a 27-year-old woman in England and I’ve been involved on and off with a 30-year-old man in the US for about 5½ years after meeting through a prison penpal site. He was incarcerated for theft of iPhones. He was released from prison in February this year.

I visited him in the US for 10 days after his release and things were amazing. I went back again in April for 2 weeks, but leading up to that trip things had already become extremely unhealthy. He became intensely paranoid that I was cheating or hiding things despite never once catching me cheating, lying, or doing anything suspicious.

For the first 2 weeks after coming home after the first trip, things were great. Then the paranoia started. It started with small things being interpreted as “off” behaviour — for example after I came home from the first trip, I didn’t want phone sex for a few days because my period was due, and he later said that’s when his trust issues started because I “started acting different.” Other normal behaviour then became suspicious to him like taking more than a few rings to answer a FaceTime call because my phone was in the other room or not replying immediately because I was cleaning. Any time that these things happens, I was accused of being with somebody else.

Over the next couple of weeks until the next trip, I started constantly reassuring him and changing my behaviour to avoid accusations:

always being available,
updating him constantly,
sitting on FaceTime for hours every night,
screen sharing while on FaceTime
sharing my location
constantly explaining myself
Having to show him around my flat on FaceTime, open cupboard doors to show him that nobody was hiding in them

A few days before my April trip we fell asleep on FaceTime together and the next morning he told me that throughout the night he was hearing moaning and lots of banging and lots of noises and he was convinced that I was fake sleeping on a green screen. He then started asking for things like my iCloud login and Instagram password to “prove” I wasn’t doing anything. I refused because by that point I already felt like nothing was ever enough and more access would just create more paranoia. I was genuinely becoming ill with the constant accusations and treading on eggshells and there would be 2/3 hour long conversations every evening when I got home from work with me trying to reassure him and him accusing me of the next thing I was supposedly lying about.

The only thing that had kept me in a relationship with him until this point was the fact that he was very self-aware, when he wasn’t spiralling he would say to me I know that this isn’t healthy and I know that I’ve got severe trust issues and I know that what I’m asking of you isn’t right or healthy and you are justified in saying no to passwords etc but he said that if I really wasn’t doing anything behind his back and I really wanted to try and help him then I would have no problem sharing these things so I’m essentially making everything worse by not helping him, completely disregarding how I have changed my entire lifestyle to help ease his fears.

I was debating on whether to go on the April trip or not but decided to go hoping that me physically being there with him would be able to help ease his anxieties and help him feel more secure for when I next go home.

During my April trip I discovered he had secretly bought spy cameras off Amazon and hidden them in the bedroom and bathroom to record me and monitor my phone screen while he was in another room. I saw loads of recordings of me just lying on the bed on TikTok while he watched remotely. I barely reacted at the time because I had become so used to trying to soothe his trust issues.

Aside from finding out about the spy cameras, the April trip went extremely well and I felt really positive coming home (that sounds crazy I know given the history of everything) but within a couple of days things went back to how they were before. He then requested that I gave him access to the security camera in my flat which I stupidly agreed to hoping that would solve all of our problems because I knew that I had genuinely nothing to hide. When the cameras obviously proved nobody was coming in or out, instead of feeling reassured he just moved the accusations onto my “behaviour” instead — things like turning lights on/off, the way I moved around, etc. He would call me a “weirdo” constantly for completely normal things like questioning why I kept my hairbrush in the living room rather than my bedroom and he was telling me that I was manipulating lights in a certain way to block certain doorways to sneak people in.

He has also screen recorded FaceTimes and later interrogates me about tiny movements like:

“At 4:27 why did you look left, who was there?”

I genuinely started feeling psychologically unwell:

hypervigilant,
constantly on eggshells,
scared to miss calls,
scared to move wrong on FaceTime,
constantly trying to prevent accusations.

A couple of weeks ago I basically had a mental breakdown and told him I can’t do it anymore and this is where I revoked camera access, turned my location off and told him I wasn’t going to continue in this relationship anymore if he doesn’t change and work on himself. Since then, over the past couple of weeks things have been better (less accusations) but there are massive double standards which I believe he has only done to punish me for revoking the access:

he has changed his phone password and told me that I can’t go on his phone anymore when we’re physically together
he stopped sharing his location,
he admits he withholds affection (says luv u when I say I love you things like that) and refuses to explain things to “make me feel how he feels,” (for example on a FaceTime I saw him zooming in on a picture of a girl on his camera roll in the reflection of his glasses and when I asked him about that he told me that he would not explain anything because I refuse to give him my passwords)
he’s gone out to bars until 5am leaving his phone at home
but if I question anything, I’m accused of “spinning things.”

Meanwhile, emotionally the relationship has become completely one-sided. Everything revolves around regulating him and his anxiety. Even though I’m not being met with extreme accusations anymore, constant little comments are being made. My needs only seem to matter when they don’t conflict with his insecurities.

Examples:

I recently found a lump in my breast and had an appointment at a breast clinic. Despite all our issues, he didn’t even check in or ask how it went. I genuinely think he forgot because he’s so consumed with himself and monitoring me.
Sex is extremely selfish. He doesn’t care about my pleasure and refuses oral sex, while everything revolves around him.

Financially I’ve invested massively:

flights,
hotels,
clothes,
trips,
general support,
probably around £10k over the years.

He recently promised to start paying me back weekly after getting a job, but so far has only sent £250 and complains about sending money despite having very low living expenses.

The biggest issue now is that I genuinely feel like there is no “solving” this because the goalposts constantly move. Whenever I provide proof or reassurance, a new accusation appears:

cameras proved nobody entered my flat → accusations shifted to my behaviour,
he demanded to see my emails to prove I logged him out of Spotify because he suddenly couldn’t access my Spotify on his phone → when no password reset email existed, he claimed I must have deleted it,
every reassurance just turns into another theory.

He says I’m manipulative and “spin things,” but I have been doing nothing but bending over backwards trying to help him while becoming mentally drained in the process.

The confusing part is that I do believe he genuinely loves me and is just really struggling with adjusting to life in the real world and I don’t think he can help the way he feels insecure and paranoid because he was never like this in prison. He is very self-aware like I have said and he is very aware of the fact that his behaviour isn’t normal and it’s unfair to me. I don’t think he wakes up every day thinking “I want to abuse her.” But at the same time, his behaviour has become controlling, emotionally exhausting, invasive, and honestly psychologically damaging for me.

He is now saying he wants me to do a polygraph/lie detector test in June when i’m next due to fly out to see him, he says that’s the only way that this behaviour is going to stop, he needs proof from a lie detector test that I am not a cheat or a liar. At first I agreed because I genuinely have nothing to hide and I thought maybe it would finally put everything to bed, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realised that even if I passed, I honestly don’t think it would change anything. Every time one accusation gets disproved, another one appears instead. It feels like he’s so determined to prove I’m lying that no amount of reassurance, evidence or “proof” will ever actually be enough.

Right now I’m at the point where:

I love him,
but I don’t think I can do this anymore,
I feel like I’ve lost myself,
and I’m struggling to tell whether there’s genuinely any hope of recovery after enabling/reinforcing this dynamic for so long.

Has anyone actually come back from a relationship dynamic this extreme and ended up healthy? Or is this realistically too far gone?