Dear Akansha,

I always told him that he is selfish but I guess being selfish is not always bad. In this case, however, he did make me feel small. When I dug deeper into our issues and owned up to my mistakes and issues. He let me stew in it. He never took responsibility for anything. It was all my fault and you see I was so blind that I didn’t even question him. My whole point was to take ownership of my mistakes but do you think it’s possible that it was just me?

Of course it wasn’t just you… but he blamed you, and because deep down you felt unworthy and unimportant (your original childhood wound), you actually believed him. You believed it was exclusively your fault, and that you need to change, not him.

When my ex told me that “you are the important thing” I actually felt bad. I was like so I am important and a spiritual person since I try to understand why people do what they do. I didn’t want to give power to that thought since then I would have been chuffed.

Because of your original wound, you didn’t believe you were important. No matter how much he told you that (in the beginning of your relationship), there was still a part of you that didn’t believe it.

But still, he made you feel special, important and beautiful – everything you’ve craved since childhood – and you completely fell for him. You opened up to him like to no one before (I never opened up to anyone like this), you bared your soul. You thought he was “the one” – because he gave you what you craved for. And you became needy and clingy, I guess like with no one before – because you couldn’t afford to lose “the one”.

Unfortunately he exploited your openness and vulnerability:

He used to tell me I am not expressive and when I started doing that he abandoned me. … I even shared it with my ex after we broke up and explained the reason why I was the way I was. And he just used it to quote the reasons he didn’t like me then.

Maybe he liked your old self: the cheerful, put-together, strong self, in whom he saw a mother figure. And he despised your needy and clingy self (the little girl inside of you), who came out of hiding because she thought she was safe with him. Once she came out, he’s hurt her badly. She tried to please him, to do everything to make him happy, so he would stay…

And a part of you is still hoping that he would come back (at least when you wrote your first post, you were still hoping, you were still in love with him). That’s the little girl who still believes he is her savior, her prince charming, who will give her the perfect love…

By now you probably know, at least on the rational level, that he is not the prince charming… and that there is no prince charming – you need to save yourself. You need to give yourself the love and appreciation you’ve been craving for.

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As for karma, I don’t know what to believe about it, but what I know is that we repeat the same experience until we learn the lesson. I don’t think you did anything wrong with your previous ex, and specially not that you suffered in your latest relationship because of something you did in your earlier relationship.

Maybe I am suffering for that suffering I might have caused him. He is a good friend now and I have talked to him about it. He says he didn’t know why did he act the way he did but I was clearly not honest in telling him my feelings have changed when he was trying to reconcile. I just told him the reasons it cant work.

So your previous ex was emotionally unavailable, wouldn’t talk about his emotions, you felt lonely in the relationship… and eventually he left you. No wonder your feelings have changed – you probably entered the relationship with some hopes and expectations, and your feelings have probably changed because he didn’t meet those expectations. Your feelings might have changed while you were still in the relationship, and that’s why you let it go so easily: you didn’t fight for him when he broke up with you.

Two years later, when he contacted you again, seeking reconciliation, you probably still felt the same – you fell out of love long ago, and there was nothing he could say or do that would make you fall back in love. Am I guessing this right? Is that what you feel guilty about – that you didn’t tell him something like “sorry, don’t even bother because I am not interested any more”?