Anita-
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond! Yes I believe you are understanding things correctly–I edited to make the story shorter so thank you for mentioning the parts about my relationships with family.
Our relationship was an instant connection, and we grew very close very quickly. I met him through mutual friends. We had frequent fights about 4 months in. I can be very conflict avoidant, and my ex would take this very personally and these issues would often build up and blow up at inconvenient times (holidays, with friends). The issues were often only small things that built up over time, but the fighting was frequent, extremely unproductive and hurtful. It mostly happened at the middle of our relationship. A lot of our fights were because one of his close friends disliked me and would try to convince my ex to break up with me, and would talk badly about me to our mutual friends, which caused a lot of emotional fights and arguments between us.

Towards the end, our disagreements were about breaking up; I was getting into emotional arguments with my ex because I still feel/felt the connection between us and he said that he no longer was sure about anything, including our relationship. we had discussed the feeling that he had (similar to what I’ve described feeling), but I did not want to end the relationship at all. He had a very difficult past with a lot of family issues/death and drug abuse, and was feeling more lost than I am. The ending was hard for me because I did not want to let go, and he still holds resentment toward me for pushing him to hold out hope for our relationship for the last 2 months of us being together. I hold no more resentment, or anger, and have been working on being compassionate towards myself for holding on even when I knew that our current relationship had run its course. My current state of mind is that while looking at our past and looking toward the future, I think there’s a likelihood that we will get back together, but I am trying to remind myself that living fully in the present moment and letting go means acknowledging that it doesn’t matter.

I feel like I became desperate and codependent because I was afraid of my ex leaving, when I should have acknowledged that the whole time I already knew what his decision would be because it was what he felt in his gut. I feel like giving into this fear response has made me lose a lot of self confidence and self respect, and that’s making my problem much worse.