Dear John:

“If I am understanding this right, it sounds like I’m self absorbed??”- in my experience of you on this thread, yes you have been self absorbed.

You wrote that you have been told that you say what others want to hear, and that you did that with your ex girlfriend a lot. You were afraid that she will end the relationship with you if you told her what you truly felt, so you told her what you thought she wanted to hear.

“That didn’t end the way I wanted it to”, that is, she ended the relationship. I suppose, you were wrong about what you thought she wanted to hear.

You wrote that you are “a go with the flow kind of guy”. To go with the flow effectively, you have to have an understanding or insight about the nature of the flow. Specifically, if you wanted to really tell your ex girlfriend what she wanted to hear, it would have been useful for you to have insight into how she thinks and feels, what motivates her and what she values. With such insight, you would have a good chance of saying what she truly wanted to hear. Without insight you are shooting in the dark.

You wrote that she told you that you “kept assuming things”, and you wrote: “I couldn’t believe why the reason was she told me and I would make up or assume other reasons in my head and believe them and begin to doubt her”- this is a big problem in a relationship, when the person stated the truth to you (I assume she did) and you treat her truth as a lie. No wonder you “irritated her again”. It is very irritating for a person sharing her truth to be doubted, repeatedly.

You wrote that in life you don’t stand up for yourself, don’t do or say what you really want, all so to avoid confrontation. “If I say something and it causes any kind of conflict, I immediately retract my words and rephrase that”- that is crazy making for a person who cares about honest communication to communicate with a person who is basically not honest, that is, saying their truth one moment, then saying what is not true, but without the qualification: this here is my truth, there I am making it up. For an honest person, not knowing when you say the truth and when not, that is crazy making!

Better you make a practice, John, today and every day to tell the truth, especially to the people you care about. Oh, how refreshing is the truth, how welcome it will be by those who need it desperately.

You wrote that your ex girlfriend told you that you hear what you want to her, that is you don’t hear what she is saying. Your current girlfriend told you that you don’t listen to her”. We people often have our own voices talking to us while another person is talking to us and we hear our own voices instead of the person’s. It takes noticing what voices you are hearing and then putting yours aside long enough to hear the other person.

You wrote about your ex girlfriend: “She would get so excited and just loved that… her laughing was amazing… the little things would make her laugh and smile. Oh that smile! and her eyes! … She would get so animated and excited. ‘look how big they are!’ little things like that… How much she loved being with my girls and doing things with them. You could tell just by looking at her that she really enjoyed it and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else… She would help them and she loved it… It’s hard to put it all into words. I did really feel connected to her in a big way”

It reads to me that what attracted you so intensely to your ex girlfriend was her expressive excitement being with you, that you “could tell just by looking at her that she really enjoyed it and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else”. She was very different from your mother who wasn’t excited being with you, didn’t really wanted to be there with you. This is why she left you, why she disappeared from your life for long periods, and when she was present in your life physically, she wasn’t excited having you in her life.

But your ex, she really wanted to be with you, she enjoyed herself. That was promising to you, promising that she will want to stay, that she wouldn’t leave.

“I want to be that guy that is happy, that doesn’t need other people or things to make me happy. But i’m not. I do feel needy all the time. Maybe it does stem back to my childhood and fear of rejection”- yes, it does stem from your childhood, this is where we are all formed, in the years of your childhood.  Because you were rejected a lot in childhood, the fear of being rejected has been intense ever since.

We can’t help needing other people, this is our  nature, as the social animals we are born to be. We are all people who need people. A solitary animal like a turtle can be as happy as a turtle can be all by itself, but a social animal, like a dog.. impossible!

I suggest that you make a practice of listening to your current girlfriend, and most importantly (to me), listen to your daughters. Notice your voices, quiet those, and listen to the other person’s voice.

When you state something that is true to you, and you noticed you feel distress as you think that what you just shared would cause a conflict, pause, don’t proceed to state something not true to yourself so to avoid the perceived conflict. Instead take a deep breath and wait: is there a conflict (there may not be at all). You can also ask the listener what she understood about what you said. For example: what do you feel about what I just said?

Ask questions so to check your assumptions.

And do post again anytime you’d like, if you do.

anita