Dear Natalie:

I believe it will be easier for you to “fix (yourself) first” (your aim, last words of your post) when not in a relationship with him. When interacting with him you get triggered a lot and react automatically, isn’t it so? Not necessarily because he did something wrong but because old issues within you get triggered, activated. This triggering is in the way of you making the changes you need and want to make for the better.

You wrote: “Can you help me figure out why I am the way I am and what I should do to change?”

I believe that the ways you behave that are disagreeable to you are the result of past unfavorable experiences that you had, most of those experiences occurred in your childhood. During those “formative years” of childhood, many connections, or neuropathways are made in our brains. And many of them, as a result of unfortunate life experiences, are such that lead us to dysfunction, to behaviors that don’t serve us.

For example, you making yourself  “out to be the victim… and need constant validation” probably indicates your childhood real life experience of not having been validated. You making yourself out to be a victim may be your way of trying to get attention and validation and your anger may very well be about not having gotten that validation as a child.

Those neuropathways in our brain stay with us throughout adulthood because we don’t … shed our brain, the nerve cells and the connections in it do not get replaced. We shed our skin cells but not our brain cells.

It is possible to interrupt those neuropathways, and so, to change ourselves with work and time.

anita