Hi Adam,

I was relying on her for happiness in a lot of cases but I slowly started to feel alone towards the end. Like I lost myself trying to help her.

I think all the back and forth was due to her but towards the end I pulled back a bit also. I couldn’t constantly be responsible for how she was feeling.

I am glad you’ve started to realize towards the end that it’s not right how she is treating you and that you can’t be responsible for her feelings all the time. In the past you would sort of take the blame on you and try to upset her less, which in practice meant walking on eggshells, right? But in recent times, I guess you weren’t so apologetic and this made her even more upset and angry?

I never made her responsible for my feelings which I regret not making her more accountable but as you said nothing would change.

Yes, she wouldn’t have had a sudden epiphany and decided to start taking responsibility for herself. I am sure she would have accused you of being unloving and broken up with you, like she always did. In fact, you said that the last time she broke up with you was after you mentioned that sometimes you feel she detaches from you and has this blank stare, if I remember well.

So you were noticing things about her behavior in the past too and tried to point it out to her, but she didn’t like it. Her reaction was to accuse you and break up. Which tells me that she didn’t have the capacity to take any constructive criticism – to take any responsibility for how she was reacting in certain situations.

I believe she will contact me again. She will need to drop off some things of mine in the next week and I will return hers. Not sure how we should go about that. Do you think having contact is a bad idea? Should we not speak and just grab our things and go separate ways like she said she wanted?

I think you should just be polite, but without engaging in another conversation. Because that would hook you up again. Keep it superficial, because going into any depth again will make you vulnerable. There isn’t much more to say, if you’re being honest with yourself. She has her view of reality, where she is the victim and you are the villain, and you can’t really do anything about that. She needs to grow up first. But it’s not your task to push her along that path… you’ve done that enough in the past.

So my advice is: keep it short and cordial, wish her all the best, perhaps give her a friendly hug (if it wouldn’t be too much for either of you). And go your way.

I am talking about it to a lot of people and using my support. It’s just a shock to the system realizing I was being abused and manipulated a lot of the time.

Great that you have a support system – that’s super important! I understand your shock and a sense of being violated. If it helps at all, she wasn’t doing it on purpose. It was her trauma leading the game. And you were vulnerable because you wanted to make her happy, you wanted to be that special someone for whom she’ll finally change.

But you’ve learned now, in these past couple of months, that she isn’t willing to change. On the contrary, she wants you to change, to fit even better to her requirements, so she wouldn’t get triggered. Which is mission impossible and very unhealthy. This was actually driving her abuse – blaming you and not taking responsibility for her own feelings and reactions.

It could be that what adds to your shock is that you haven’t seen it before. You thought she wanted to change. And now you’ve realized that no, she doesn’t. She wants you to change. So you were in a kind of wishful thinking about it. You wanted it to be true, but it wasn’t true….

I will stay in touch on here as well as be proactive and look for distractions to keep myself busy.

Yes, take good care of yourself. Self-care isn’t a distraction, it’s vital, so practice that 🙂 Try to turn inward and focus on your own needs. Because so far you were very much focused on her. And yes, get a lot of support, both from friends and therapy.

Post anytime you feel the need!