Dear Kenny:

I want to re-read and rewrite what you shared. It helps me to process information when I do that. My purpose is to see if I can learn something new about your situation.

You are currently staying at a friend’s university dorm, sleeping on the floor, being in a situation where you might get evicted any minute. You owe the dorm management money. You are no  longer a student there. You started smoking again. You have no support from your family who is in the habit of criticizing you and giving you the message that you are worthless.

A year ago you met a woman and started a relationship with her. While in that beginning relationship you were still friends with an ex girlfriend who pressured you to “continue treating her like a close friend getting her food and making sure she is ok”. Your new girlfriend found out about that and called you “a cheater, a liar”.

Your new girlfriend then continued to complain about anything you did, including such thing as you choosing to drink cold water at night, petty things. Then she pressured you to no longer go to the gym, and to quit powerlifting, your hobby, threatening you to end the relationship with you if you didn’t accommodate her, so you accommodated her, but were unhappy doing so. You stood up to her twice and each time she ended the relationship with you, calling you names the second time she broke up with you. You responded by accommodating her and she resumed the relationship with you. While in the relationship you spent money on dates, so to “keep up with her lifestyle”, money you couldn’t afford spending.

You are struggling with “knowing that all the sacrifices I have made for her were for nothing”, all sacrifices ending with her telling you “how much of a horrible person I am”, accusing you of being “abusive and controlling”. She also accused you of sulking and being “a negative person” in her life. When the two of you argued, she threatened to leave. When you tried to stop her from leaving she accused you of being controlling.

At one point she was angry at you when you tried to fix the water so that she will have the hot water she wanted when taking a shower. You in turn “threw things around… accidently threw her phone”, and she proceeded to tell you that you are “the worst person” she’s ever met and that you are trash. You then apologized to her, then told her to punch you and used her arm to punch you. That caused her arm to hurt and swell because of an injury she had before. She then told you that you are abusive and that she told her family that you are abusive.

You wrote: “I tried so so hard to take care of her and put her before my own happiness, sanity and wellbeing.. wasted so much energy trying to please her… I’ve given so much and lost so much of myself”. You blame yourself for “letting that happen. For letting someone control what I do”. And you wrote: “I can never get through to her make her think about what she did”.

Now my input: this woman has been cruel to you. This is easy to determine. The fact that you broke her phone and hurt her arm doesn’t change the fact that she has been repeatedly, relentlessly and unapologetically cruel to you, never expressing an intent to stop her cruelty toward you.

Your parents sent you the repeated message that you are worthless,  so you naturally believed them. When you then entered the dating world, this belief was right there. You allowed your ex girlfriend to determine your actions because you were afraid that not accommodating her would mean that you are indeed worthless and a bad person. You then proceeded to accommodate the new girlfriend, believing that if you don’t, that would mean that you are indeed worthless and a bad person.

Reads like the ex girlfriend was desperate and so she wanted your attention. The new girlfriend had the added cruelty to her. Accommodating a person who is cruel to you is of course a bad, bad idea. You don’t change a cruel person by accommodating their cruelty. When you do, you are in for more and more of that cruelty.

It was a bad idea to accommodate the ex girlfriend because it was not for your benefit. You have to consider your benefit, your well being, your sanity and not compromise these things so to benefit another.

Back to your parents’ message that you are worthless, the message you believed (we believe our parents, naturally, no matter how wrong they are, or how cruel)- this is your core belief, a belief that will continue to harm you in your future relationships and in life. Got to examine this core belief and change it to what is true. Best place to do this is in psychotherapy and I hope such is available for you.

When a child is stuck with a cruel parent, there is nowhere for the child to run, no way to end the relationship with the cruel parent, so the child does all he can do to change the parent, to prove to the parent that you are a good boy, hoping that way that the parent will be good to you in return.

I think this is what you did with this most recent girlfriend, the cruel girlfriend, trying to prove to her by accommodating her cruelty, that you are a good person, so that she will realize it and be good to you in return.

It is a repeat, seems to me, of the child-parent relationship you had/ have. Got to examine this relationship, resolve it, so that you can move on, no longer trying to accommodate cruel people but avoid them altogether. And so that you will no longer try to accommodate people, cruel or not, when it is to your disadvantage.

I hope you post again with your thoughts and feelings.

anita