Hi Anita,

Thank you for your last message, this really helps me to forgive myself. I’ve noticed the last few days something about the last interaction I had with this ex has been upsetting me. Actually, a few things. I remember the very last time I saw him, we had arranged to meet for lunch for him to return some items of mine from his home. I thought of this lunch as a final goodbye, and finally an opportunity to speak up for myself and tell him how I felt about how he handled things between us, specifically how he treated me near the end and how he began dating his new partner while still seeing me.

However, he ended up inviting his male colleague to join us for lunch without telling me, and I never had the opportunity after all to confront him. I tried again a few months later over the phone, however, I found myself locking up, and in the end, I never did. I simply wished him well. About a year after that, around April of 2018, I sent him a strange Facebook message where I apologized, rather than asking him to, or expressing how I felt about everything. To this day, I’m not exactly sure why I did this. I know I had just taken my medication for ADHD which often made me hyper and a little impulsive (I no longer take it) and I remember my current partner encouraging me to do so. He says at the time he really thought it would help me gain closure for myself, and put the past in the past once and for all. However, the ex I’m referring to instead read this apology, and rather than reply or even just ignoring it, he blocked me. I have found ever since that it is a sore spot for me, that after everything I had done for this ex, all the pain I endured from his behaviour, that this was the last “interaction” I ever had. Him and his current partner blocking me. I understand what this means, that he never wants to speak to me again. However, I feel silenced once and for all, that I never was able to voice my truth to him, to call him out on any of his cruel behaviours to me. Instead, I let him believe I was the one in the wrong, the one needing to apologize. I have no idea what I was thinking, why I put myself out there to be hurt and rejected once again by this person after so much time had passed.

These days, I waver back and forth over if I should contact him one more if only to say my piece. I know no matter what he will never apologize, and I will never get any acknowledgement on his part of the pain he caused me, but I feel I have done a disservice to myself to have never spoken up for myself to him. Do you think it is possible for me to forgive myself for this if I don’t ever speak up? It has been almost a year now, and although I believe I have finally put the relationship behind me, it is the ending and that once again I didn’t have my own back that is upsetting me. Of all the things I regret about that past relationship, including that horrible night that I lashed out at him, it is this apology I sent a year ago that I regret the most. I wish I had thought about it more, and had not sent it. In fact, most of it was copied and pasted from an apology I wrote to my first ex, the one I lived with for years. He actually deserved that apology, whereas the ex I sent it to a year ago never did in my opinion, as I had apologized already many times in the past. I believe in many ways I was hoping if I apologized, perhaps he would have to. However, he did not, and if anything further opened the wound.