Dear Mina:

We understandably get scared when a person is angry at us because an angry person sometimes, often enough, will try to hurt the person he or she is angry at. Animals scare other animals with expressions of anger such as growling. Anger is scary except when you trust a person to not express their anger in behavior that is hurtful to you.

And then we often feel badly when we feel angry at another person, once again, figuring feeling angry and hurting another is the same thing. But anger is a helpful and necessary feeling. We don’t choose to feel it, how can we then be guilty of feeling it. We choose if and how we express it.

I like it very much that he expressed to you that he is feeling and doing fine and that you need not worry about him. It is such a burden and in your case, a torture, to worry about someone else, having no way to help them (“I tortured myself everyday for not being able to be ‘there’ for him, so it was really hard for me emotionally and physically”).

At this point, what it comes to, I believe, is that your life is about you, or should be. I hope it is. There was very, very little that was in your power to do for him when in the relationship, the four months with often days and even weeks of not seeing him.

You have some power to be “there” for yourself, to consider the thought that your feelings matter as much as anyone else’s, and that it is your job, your lifetime career, so to speak, to operate for the benefit of your own well-being. Part of doing so is to have win-win interactions and relationships with others.

I strongly advise you to not worship another person, like you have worshipped him. Remember you referred to him as an “ex partner” before you changed it to “ex boyfriend”? When you worship a person, you are not a partner and he is not your partner. You are a lesser,  a lowly, an inferior. Why would you want to be that in a relationship or otherwise in life. I hope you don’t have a reason, not anymore.

anita