Dear LinLin:

“a week before he left I had unintentionally been acting like a total ass. I was picking small arguments, blaming him for being angry/ annoyed with me based on his facial expressions, tone of voice”-

-you are not really seeing his face, in your mind’s eye,  or hearing his voice, you are seeing and hearing the faces and voices of your parents.

In 2018 you shared: “had both of my parents mad at me so it scared me into being a goody good. So that I would not get those angry  glares and passive aggressiveness from them. Even now, my Mom still looks at me constantly with an angry glare/ tone of voice or passive aggressive language”.

It is your mother’s “angry glare/ tone of voice or passive aggressive language” that you see in your boyfriend’s face and hear in his voice and words. And when you see those things, you get scared and you get angry back. Only the man wasn’t angry with you.

We keep re-living our childhood experience as adults, keep projecting our parents into the new people in our lives. You did the same thing with your previous boyfriend.

We can peel off the past from the present; peel off our childhood experience from our current, adulthood experience if we examine and process the childhood experience that scarred us.

anita