Dear Stacy:

I know you gave (and still do) great importance to what he said, to the words he uttered and texted to you. Let’s look at one sentence he said to you, which you mentioned today: “he told me after the breakup that he was ‘eternally grateful for me for showing him he is worthy of love.'”-

– His words are an expression of his style, not of his substance. If it was his genuine experience that he felt worthy of love because of you.. he’d still be in a relationship with you.

Saying what he said after the breakup is meant to appease .. the opponent, so to speak, as in saying: I am breaking up with you, but thank you for being so great! It’s a common, every day making-nice strategy aimed at avoiding confrontations.

“When he dumped me…  he tried to wrap it up poetically by quoting our first Hinge conversation, hoping it would appease me“- his motivation: to appease, his style: poetic.

“He claimed they never made anything official but that she…”- what he claimed was not necessarily true.

“I still feel like he might have used me as a rebound to get back at her in his mind, even unknowingly.(I know, I’m doing it again. I think I make a lot of fatalistic conclusions..)”- conclusions based on his style (not substance); on what he claimed.

“I think I make a lot of fatalistic conclusions so as to try to gain control)”- try to gain control over what?

“The visuals remind me of the 2007 Sweeney Todd film with the character of Johanna being locked in her bedroom, singing to a bird in a cage and looking wistfully outside her window seeing people going about their lives below“-

– it’s like you being locked in (your life suspended), you being the bird in a cage, a bird meant to fly and be free. And locked in and caged, you are looking wistfully outside the window (looking at your ex’s social media activity), seeing him going about his life and wishing he had freed you and taken you with him to freedom.

“She sings through her pain and it gives her hope, even if it’s all she has. I always really resonated with the idea of being JUST out of reach for what you long for and feeling powerless to your surroundings”-  Just out of reach of freedom, feeling powerless to reach freedom on your own (without the ex): Learned Helplessness.

It reminds me of the real-life imagery I read about in regard to learned helplessness: a baby elephant’s leg was chained so he could only walk around a small area. He tried again and again to walk farther but being a baby, he was too weak to break the chain. And so, he stopped trying.  As the baby grew into a big, strong adult elephant, still chained, he kept walking around the small area that the chain allowed him to walk. Big and strong, he could have easily broken the chain and set himself free, but he didn’t know that he was strong. He still believed that he was as weak as he was when he was a baby.

Do you resonate with this imagery?

anita